Launch HN: Living Carbon (YC W20) – Trees that capture and store more carbon
We released research results indicating that photosynthesis enhanced trees grow faster and capture more carbon compared to control seedlings [1, 2]. After multiple generations of vegetatively propagated tree seedlings studied in a controlled environment, our lead photosynthesis-enhanced poplar tree seedling showed a 53% increase in above ground biomass.
Data from our molecular, morphology, and physiology analyses indicate that our photosynthesis-enhancement design works as intended. We’re continuing to study these seedlings in field trials and pilot projects across the US.
Forest carbon drawdown is one of our greatest allies in the climate crisis, but the impact of forest carbon solutions has been constrained by land-use efficiency, suitability of land to support forest stands, the growth rate of trees, and the duration of carbon storage before it is released back into the atmosphere. There are many strategies to enhance carbon capture in plants, including nitrogen fixating microbes, resistance to disease and drought, salt tolerance, decomposition resistance, and photosynthesis enhancement. Our initial focus has been two-fold: (1) improve carbon capture in trees via more efficient photosynthesis, and (2) improve carbon storage through decay-resistant wood, which slows the release of carbon through decomposition resistance.
Our approach is to use an alternative metabolic bypass pathway that allows our seedlings to break down toxic byproducts of photosynthesis using less energy. Usually, waste products of photorespiration are exported from the chloroplast to multiple organelles for metabolic cycling. Our biotechnology enables the chloroplast to break down these waste products internally and turn them into energy-rich glucose and cellulose, thereby growing faster and capturing more CO₂ over time. This method can operate across many different species and doesn't require an intensive human re-engineering process.
This process is similar to the natural process that already exists in 15% of plants, called C4 carbon fixation, which have separately evolved special features to combat photorespiration and are more photosynthetically efficient and productive. Examples of C4 plants include corn, sorghum, and sugarcane. Our strategy achieves similar results to C4 carbon fixation in the remaining 85% of C3 plants, starting with trees.
To ensure this carbon is stored for longer, we are also developing a trait to naturally slow decay by increasing metal accumulation in plants. Our trees accumulate metals from the soil, making their wood less digestible to fungi and slowing the return of CO2 to the atmosphere. As a bonus, this makes our trees uniquely well suited to land with high heavy metal concentration. We’re targeting underutilized, abandoned mine land across the U.S.—areas where trees would otherwise not grow.
If we can increase the efficiency of photosynthesis by 30-40% and if we can also reduce the decomposition rate of wood, then we will have a biological method of active drawdown that avoids the conflicting incentives, high starting costs, and requirement for ongoing and intensive management seen in methods such as direct air capture.
Living Carbon got started when Maddie read a paper on improving photosynthesis in tobacco and thought that someone should try this in trees. After talking to the author of that paper and other experts in forest biotechnology, turns out it wasn't only possible but a very good idea.
We want to help ignite hope, in our current era of climate instability, that we can use the tools of biotechnology to empower our ecosystems and help plants do what they do best. We welcome your thoughts and discussion!
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268 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] thread1. What are the trade-offs you make (if any)? Are the trees in any way less robust or "healthy" than "natural" trees?
2. How do your trees compare to Empress trees, which can supposedly capture 103 tons of carbon per acre per year [0]?
[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-02/we-alread...
Unfortunately its strength in this area is a weakness for adoption because its so highly invasive: http://www.ecosystemgardening.com/paulownia-princess-tree-on...
Bamboo might be another option. While it can be invasive I think it's much more manageable.
I know there is one that spreads quickly and uncontrollably, but other varieties don't
This may be a bit nitpicky, but one of the things sawmills produce is sawdust. What are the downstream effects of sawdust with higher metal content?
"Market" for wood is measured in decades, not months. The trees we are harvesting today are the result of a "market" selection made by our fathers and grand-fathers (typically, oak in western Europe).
Saying that Empress trees is out of fashion today because their wood is too light, might be true, but it's not the answer you should be giving. So, either you have the ability to see 40 years into the future, or you simply don't know and don't assume it won't be likeable for the next generation.
If you're approaching landowners by telling them they can turn a profit in X years, you are doing it wrong. If your motivation is greed, then you set yourself up for failure, first because price forecast 25 years in the future are absolutely idiotic and meaningless (as we have seen in the past two years), then because trees are very complex organisms that take a very long time to grow. By modifying their genome you expose them to potential rejection by their peers and more things that you will discover in two decades. And also getting bared from planting them in Europe.
So, get your marketing straight : no more profit, and grow what you want. Take those carbon credits home, that's the most profitable thing you can do.
When it comes to biotechnology a lot of what matters is how you engineering an organism and why. Improving the photosynthetic efficiency of C3 plants to be similar to C4 plants is very different than something like antibiotic or pest resistance.
All joking aside, the research is fascinating.
It's just the first stop on the road from parthenogenesis to a very wide world. But, that said, a lot of species do stop there.
This has really gotta change over time. They’re the same process, just one happens with the lights on.
What would be my savings in the short term, vs what I could earn from carbon capture/timber if I paid for the planting myself?
(Plenty of people here could burn $10-100K / year for a few years, and turn an after-tax profit...)
i.e. We'll give you seeds to plant on your own land but we retain all the rights to carbon subsidies and credits.
Cool idea and best of luck.
There's probably a good reason why C4 carbon fixation hasn't taken over the plant kingdom.
We take an ecosystem approach to everything we do. This includes understanding the interrelationships among species in a given location as well as understanding the economics to help local land stewards thrive. With access to over 17,000 tree variations, we are focused on identifying the most helpful species for a given local area.
We focus on carbon projects that create true additionality. We focus on restoring land that has been degraded or is underperforming. We are specifically interested in abandoned mine land, reclamation land, former range land or farm land. We also work with farmers to plant trees alongside agricultural crops for shade management, riparian buffers and windbreaks.
However, that said, you folks sounds like you really have your act together.
Have you heard of the Miyawaki Method?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Miyawaki#Method_and_cond...
Because evolution happens slowly, and on an evolutionary scale the increases in CO2 in the environment have basically just started to happen.
Simple: The efficiency of the C4 carbon fixation would be of little benefit to the plant itself. Evolution optimizes for the benefit of the gene-bearer.
I don't know if this is a good example, but suppose for argument's sake that flocking behavior in migratory birds contributed to the likelihood of gene propagation. Off-the-reservation individuals wouldn't benefit from this cooperation and would therefore be unlikely to enjoy having their genes propagated.
Could we posit / test for a similar selection effect in trees or other plants, in which the benefit to the individual is accrued through behaviors of the group? My first attempt at thinking about this was to consider whether trees that promote more stable weather patterns might have an easier time reproducing, but I think it's harder than this because the benefits obviously benefit other species that don't have the same kind of behaviors. All things being equal, this tends to status quo, not out-competing your neighbors.
Rather than try to go against this evolutionary process, we have incorporated natural processes from other plants and algae to achieve the same effect of avoiding photorespiration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences
These trees might become Grey Goo, if they can outgrow other trees, they can eventually infect the other ones as well. We might end up completely ruining our environment and there's no way to stop it.
I don't understand how anyone can think this is a good idea, it's one thing if you want to grow a small genetically engineered plant for your own personal use, but if you're talking about spreading this stuff throughout the world, we have no idea what the environmental impact would be.
This is like saying hey, if we stopped building new cars, and reduced driving by 30% over the next 30 years, we'd reduce global warming.
But then some guy on the board at Ford says nah, let's just plant some super trees in the ground to suck up all the pollution we're going to put out.
We have more than enough, in this world for everyone to live a decent life. It's just capitalism demands e keep consuming more and more and more regardless of the consequences.
Two naive questions:
1. Is there a theoretical maximum to the amount of carbon capture a tree can handle?
2. What's the difference in carbon capture between increasing the "efficiency of photosynthesis by 30-40%" and planting 30-40% more trees?
Feel free to reach out to me.
I think this is somewhat common, and with sea levels rising, it will become more common over time.
But "Unknown Unknowns" you say? I think the risk is a lot lower than not pursing almost every available means of scale-able carbon capture.
Silicon Valley does not have the right culture to save the planet. VC works by killing 99 companies to create one monopoly. Get back to me when we have hundreds of planets.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2021.71539...
what are the ideas and effects in a diverse ecosystem? is there any plans to safe hard natural ecosystems from getting replaced with these trees?
I could potentially support this in areas decimated by industries, like mining (as you said). what work has been done in understanding the symbiotic relationship with fungi and these trees?
We didn't even understand basic things about trees till like a few decades ago leading to stupidly counterproductive practices like spraying glyphosate all over public lands to create 'free to grow' tree plantations on what used to be forests.
All of this is done by forestry companies on public land.
If trees needed to photosynthesise faster they would already be doing it.
The fact that they aren't using this adaptation (or some other one) means that probably photosynthesis speed is already being traded off against some other factor in their communities (they form relationships with other species which we barely understand).
Edit: About those free to grow plantations? It turns out that they were trying to get rid of Alder which they thought was competing with Spruce. It turns out that the Alder were feeding the Spruce seedlings instead.
We’ve developed a photosynthesis enhancement trait to increase plants’ growth rate and carbon sequestration potential. Some plants have naturally developed a similar method of photosynthesis efficiency increase, known as C4 photosynthesis, which relies on anatomical changes that are only possible in a certain group of plants. Our method achieves similar carbon capture results without requiring elaborate anatomical changes. This is incredibly different from developing an organism that is resistant to glyphosate.
Additionally, while trees sequester an enormous amount of carbon, they also release it back into the air through decomposition. We are developing a range of tree species, with characteristics similar to a slow-decomposing spruce, that are able to keep carbon stored in the high-quality wood for longer.
Similar to the work of the American chestnut, we focus on studying our seedlings on land that otherwise would not be productive for carbon drawdown like abandon mine lands.
It's always a privilege to receive such a well thought out answer to an off the cuff post like mine above.
I believe we are both arguing from two orthogonal axes. You are responding from the rational perspective and I am responding from an emotional one.
From my perspective, so many promises like this have been made to fix the world with this 'one simple trick' that it raises way to many alarm bells for me.
I go on vacation at a town where there was a famous protest which prevented a forestry company from cutting a large swath of old growth.
The natives managed to defend their claim and the land is uncut to this day. I spoke to some of them and their leaders said more or less: "The forest has always taken care of us, and we don't know how it works so we should leave it the way it is."
And this is from people who have been observing nature in this one spot for 10 000 years. They might have figured some stuff out along the way but generally the white man won't believe them. Both communities are talking past each other because they don't publish papers, and also because we don't spend much time observing nature do its thing.
I guess all I can say is I wish it worked this way, and that fixing our mistakes would be this easy.
Solutions that address 1% of the problem are worth doing-- no single approach will be able to dig us out of the hole we are in and we need to attempt to address it from all angles.
Having said that, the naive and (forgive me for saying) faulty science behind the idea of using these for "stabilizing" climate is alarming. Ecology and the processes responsible for climate stability is infinitely more complex, and most importantly CO2 does not play central role in it per se. The amount of information processing by micro-biota to render the service of climate stabilization against equilibrium thermodynamics is unreachable in any foreseeable future by humans (ie. there is not even a hope to begin modeling this from first principles -- ignoring the fact for now that no theories exists on the hierarchical correlations among the ecological levels).
Of cause I understand the "advertising" element this work needs to attract funds and investments. That is why I would not unleash my criticism in full scale here (also not appropriate here), but (humbly) I would like to see that you attract real ecologists under the umbrella, and update the narrative to account for the dominant role forests play in on-land water cycle at least on the rudimentary level. Sure, I do not mean to uproot your efforts focusing on details of photosyntheis, but climate stabilization (mean for real, not just advertisement statements) is worth to acknowledge to come as a system. At the same time, I have anxiety that with all the good intentions we can easily cause more harm (as has been done many times prior , eg. corn-ethanol additives, palm oil, etc).
It's hard to say what approach to take, and information is scarce. It would be great if projects such as yours advertised net CO2 captured per acre per year, and also $ per CO2-equivalent greenhouse reduction.
Climate ranges would also be good. Do these trees grow well in dry areas, for example?
Perhaps with trees it's easier to get carbon credits
And when you cut down a tree, more than half of the carbon in that tree stays behind in the ground (although I implore scientists to challenge and test this result further. A few of you and a number of the rest of us think this number is low and these numbers influence climate policy a great deal).
If you're engineering trees for carbon sequestration - for actual carbon sequestration, instead of for profiting off carbon sequestration - you probably need to look at root fusion and fungal symbiosis, rather than trunk volume and canopy size. One is fixing a problem. The other is gaming a system that is trying to save us from destroying ourselves. It's tantamount to wartime profiteering.
one could consider the soil itself as a living organism by the ton, and I would hope conversations around sequestering carbon will transition into conversations around increasing total biomass on earth.
Carbon gets top billing because its easily measurable and has a direct influence on the greenhouse effect, but the costs of climate change really come from the climate becoming more chaotic - every living organism acts as a buffer for storing energy, carbon, and water - the more life on earth, the more stable the atmosphere becomes.
(I'm no climate scientist, this is my impression from reading Charles Eisenstein's Climate: a New Story, totally turned me around on being fatalistic about climate change)
We can definitely use soil recarbonization as an air brake (pun not intended) for atmospheric carbon increases, but at the end of the day we enjoy an environment that was created by trees running unchecked for millions of years depositing carbon dioxide in the ground, before other fungi learned to eat lignin and slowed the process down.
When you're trying to change habits you need something to do, instead of a list of things not to do, and planting trees and learning how to make them happy are certainly things we can do.
What's best for the tree might not be best for us. Human civilization is in a time and resource crunch. This isn't about making better trees for trees sake, this is about solving the immediate problem of too much carbon in the atmosphere.
I'll give you though, that once we solve this carbon problem it's possible we might have another problem. So hopefully we keep a backup of some of these "heritage" trees.
Also it can be impossible to process in sawmills because of the dust, and it will chew through sawblades like no wood you’ve ever seen before!
The best storage is to leave what already is underground right there, until/unless there is plenty of energy to influence the carbon cycle above ground by putting it back deep below with technology without requiring the energy to be supplied by even more below-ground-carbon.
Would it be too much to ask to make replies that take the context into consideration, instead of using "autobot" mode posting generic standard text based on keywords?
Instead of trying to make trees capture more CO2 artificially or feed seaweed to cows to make them burp less methane, let's just eat less animal products?
I know, it's hard to change people's behaviors. But if you really want to make a dent in climate change, find ways how we can incentivize people to change their behavior (either by financial means like tax and subsidies, or by making better products like plant-based meats).
I'm making a similar comment like I made at yesterday's (?) YC launch of that lab-grown meat company. But that's because for me something like this, while it might be interesting research, is just one of those "future tech magic" things (just like carbon capture and lab-grown meat). We need real solutions, and we need them to work today. Not in 2 years from now.
0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4.epdf?shar...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfalfa#Ecology
Stressors in microgravity could shed clues on optimization for a changing climate and off-world production.
Post flight research (tomography, electron microscopy, single cell transcriptomics) is being done at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the Joint Genomics Institute. HTTPS://magnitude.io
Evolution is not immune to getting stuck in local maxima.
I find this theoretical comment so strange because it completely contradicts our experimental knowledge of plants.
Humans been selectively breeding plants for food for thousands of years. Corn that was selectively bred in the Americas looks and functions almost nothing like its wild ancestors. But - by this theoretical argument - this selective breeding shouldn't have worked! If making the plant more food-efficient was possible the corn "would already be doing it".
It would do that because it would be in a community again and not in a mono-culture farm field supported by synthetic inputs.
You 100% will not get teosinte from unattended corn. They're genetically so different after thousands of years of agriculture that there's no turning back the clock. It would probably occupy a fairly different niche if it were left alone.
It might not revert to teosinte (maybe how much time have you got?) but it also wouldn't stay as the corn we are used to with eight inch corn cobs either.
But my main point stands. Just because we were able to selectively breed something doesn't mean we 'improved it' we improved it for very specific purposes and to be grown with additional inputs in poor soil.
And we also bred it to match our industrial processes. Etc...
A wild plant wouldn't care about any of that, and it would quickly morph into something that exchanges nutrients with other plant in a community, not in neat rows of green desert.
It's so genetically different that it definitely would not. But honestly who cares what it would do if you just tossed out some seed and walked away?
> Just because we were able to selectively breed something doesn't mean we 'improved it' we improved it for very specific purposes
Definitionally that is an improvement. What are you trying to say here?
Also corn was selectively bred for thousands of years to grow in relatively poor soil, it just doesn't fix nitrogen.
> A wild plant wouldn't care about any of that, and it would quickly morph into something that exchanges nutrients with other plant in a community
You can already plant beans with corn to fix nitrogen and you don't need to fertilize, you just get lower yields per acre. Not all plants share nutrients like that, and certainly not all of the plants we might want to eat.
This line of thinking totally ignores how much food we're now able to grow on so little land. Obviously we could make better use of cover crops, advancements in no til planting, drip irrigation, and managing soil health but we've done something really amazing. For the first time in human history, there's plenty of food for everyone year after year.
You are anthropomorphizing nature. We human have needs, we modified crops and plants for bigger and tastier fruits and vegetables. Trees and nature doesn't have "needs". During the carboniferous, trees set the atmosphere on fire due to excess of dead trees (wood) and oxygen. They "didn't care". Hopefully, later, creatures evolved & processed trees and a balance was achieved.
'We' don't even understand basic things about trees now, because we're operating on old information.
I'm hearing soil scientists griping and sniping about their peers dragging their feet in acknowledging new research. The future is here, but unevenly distributed.
Elaine Ingham has a sometimes-awkward dislike for actinobacteria (formerly called actinomyces, because it looks like a fungus but turns out is not). She has complained on more than one occasion about people still calling it actinomyces. They are a useful microbe, but from a soil metabolism standpoint bacteria tend to be in the 'minus' column and fungi in the 'plus' column. If you've ever done a budget and put something in the wrong column, you know how quickly that can screw up your conclusions.
> If trees needed to photosynthesise faster they would already be doing it.
I recall someone discovering a while back that chloroplasts have a defense mechanism that reduces photon absorption when transpiration can't keep up with waste (heat?) production from photosynthesis. If they stayed on they would fry themselves, so they shut down by degrees. Whether that's a global optimization or a local one I couldn't say. But if the leaf is the bottleneck, then plants could in fact be photosynthesizing faster. At least during midday.
If someone could select or engineer more efficient pathways, then it could stay 'on' for longer. A chloroplast that produces less waste heat. A more efficient capillary system for bringing water and removing sugars. Maybe even something as simple as min-maxing soil moisture so the leaves have as much water as they could ever want.
Or, it could make a tree that cannot reach the canopy in an established forest, because it's overtrained for full sun.
> spraying glyphosate all over public lands to create 'free to grow'
yes, this is bad. what does it have to do with the post.
> by forestry companies on public land.
also a bummer, but...what does that have to do with the post.
> If trees needed to photosynthesise faster they would already be doing it.
they don't? we just want to use them to accomplish a goal.
> We didn't even understand basic things about trees till like a few decades ago
Ok? Again, so what.
Some of humanities greatest triumphs are from selective breeding. Wolves didn't "need" to "evolve" into dogs. But we did that because dogs are great. And Brassica oleracea didn't need to turn into broccoli but we made it happen because it's delicious. And we did all this thousands of years ago, without understanding the underlying mechanisms. If OP can accomplish a goal of "eat up more Co2" who cares if humanity doesn't know everything about trees.
That being said, I do have plenty of skepticism about VC funding for this (and most projects in general). There are some really perverse incentives and VCs are generally vultures, so I'd be cautious on how this particular venture shakes out long term. But I don't think the underlying premise can be dismissed with such a superficial understanding of the topic.
Perhaps trees haven't had the time to adjust to 400+ppm CO2?
Agriculture is a huge consumer of fresh water, and in many places drought is the new normal, so reserving agricultural land for food production makes sense in drier regions.
Similarly, achieving maximum growth rates for carbon-removing trees requires fertilizer application, which can have a lot of fossil fuel costs. Introducing industrial-scale non-fossil ammonia production (using water instead of natural gas as the hydrogen source to convert atmospheric N2 to ammonia/nitrate) could reduce demand for natural gas by something like 5% globally.
However, these kinds of projects have potential for cleaning up brownfield zones, around mine sites, industrial sites etc. where metal tolerance is a useful trait. The atmospheric carbon reduction claims are not so plausible. The whole business of using forestry as an 'offset' to continue fossil fuel production has a very poor record (see Canadian forests, Alberta tar sands, and pine beetle outbreaks for example).
New trees are growing all of the time.
Net deforestation is only happening on two continents: South American and Africa. Forests are growing in Europe and Asia, and the rest of the world is around equilibrium.