Carbon to Roots

ongoing

Carbon to Roots aims to improve alfalfa, the most grown forage in the world, to help fight climate change by storing more carbon from the air into the soil. By using advanced genetic techniques and microProteins engineering, the project will develop alfalfa varieties with deeper and steeper roots. These improved root systems will store more carbon underground, reducing the amount released into the atmosphere. This research will fill three major gaps: 1. Understanding the genetic networks that control alfalfa's root system. 2. Developing deep learning methods to measure root system architecture in alfalfa. 3. Creating efficient strategies to engineer alfalfa's proteins in a dominant fashion, obtaining steeper and deeper roots bypassing homozygosity in tetraploid outcrossing alfalfa varieties. The project will use cutting-edge technologies and infrastructure and collaborate for two years with experts at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, leveraging the existing knowledge and technology in root architecture for carbon sequestration within the Harnessing Plants Initiative to achieve these goals. The knowledge acquired at Salk will be used in the final project year, when selected alfalfa varieteis will be transformed and regenerated in Denmark, at the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences of Copenhagen University, using the alfalfa tissue culture expertise of the research fellow and plant transformation infrastructure available there. The expected outcome is alfalfa plants that store more carbon in deeper soil layers, helping to mitigate global warming, as well as improve soil health and the drought resistance of the selected varieties. The discoveries achieved in this project will also benefit other crops improvement efforts. In fact, alfalfa has an incredibly high natural variation, which will be explored in Carbon to Roots to understand what are the gene variants and gene networks responsible for steeper and deeper roots in crop systems.