In 10 years, CRISPR transformed medicine. Can it now help us deal with climate change?

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https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/06/28/in-10-years-crispr-transformed-medicine-can-it-now-help-us-deal-with-climate-change/

By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News. 

Excerpt: Coming from a long line of Iowa farmers, David Savage always thought he would do research to improve crops. That dream died in college, when it became clear that any genetic tweak to a crop would take at least a year to test; for some perennials and trees, it could take five to 10 years. ...But the advent of CRISPR changed all that. Savage is now pivoting to molecular crop breeding, hoping to find ways to improve their carbon uptake and the amount of carbon they return to the soil. ...“The advent of CRISPR basically allowed us to create new molecular tools for potentially skipping the slow aspects of plant tissue culture and plant genetic engineering, which are large barriers to doing experiments in plants,” said Savage, associate professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, ...and member of the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), which focuses on the myriad uses of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing. One of his collaborators, Krishna Niyogi, UC Berkeley professor of plant and microbial biology, estimates that the suboptimal photosynthetic reactions in plants could be improved with CRISPR editing to be between 20% and 50% more efficient. That means more carbon captured from the air, complementing other efforts — in particular, halting the burning of fossil fuels — to reduce greenhouse gases. Agriculture could potentially sequester billions of tons of carbon each year. ...Capturing and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere is key to mitigating some of the worst consequences of climate change.…

See also New York Times article CRISPR in the Classroom, by Eleanor Lutz. 

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