If there’s even a smidgen of hope in the climate change story, it’s that ultimately, humans will find a way to pull enough carbon dioxide out of the air to reset the planet to something akin to “normal.”
That’s the only long-term solution, says Martin Bunzl, a professor at Rutgers University…. “Some kind of negative emissions program is inevitably going to be in our future….”
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Here’s something that might just work, though: Using the techniques of modern genetic engineering, including CRISPR, to modify global plants so they take up carbon dioxide from the air more efficiently. “…you get a self-replicating system which will continue once the changes propagate through living organisms to improve carbon dioxide uptake,” says Bunzl.
Biological systems are already many times more efficient than chemical systems at scrubbing CO2 from air, and there’s reason to believe they could get even better. A team of biochemists in Germany recently developed a new molecular transformation chain that, at least in the lab, is about 25 percent more efficient than … photosynthesis. A living system genetically engineered to use this pathway might metabolize carbon dioxide two or three times as fast as it otherwise would, the researchers predict….
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: Will Genetically Modified Plants Save Us From Climate Change?
