In the south Georgia pine belt they were planted yesterday. thousand poplarsnot ordinary, but with an important feature.

About 5,000 of these seedlings have been genetically modified to grow quickly and absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Poplars are believed to be the first genetically modified trees planted in the United States outside of research trials or commercial gardens.

And just as the introduction of the Flavr Savr tomato in 1994 paved the way for a new genetically modified food industry, so now the leaders of this project are striving to transform forestry.

According to San Francisco-based biotech company Living Carbon, which inspired and produced poplars, the goal is for its trees to be a large-scale solution to the problem. changing of the climate.

“A lot of people have told us it’s not possible,” says Mandy Hall, co-founder and CEO of the company, of her dream of using genetic engineering to improve the climate. However, there were those who believed in her dream, she says, and they were enough for a $36 million investment in a start-up company to make a difference.

Living Carbon poplars start life in a workshop in Hayward, California. There, biologists figure out how trees photosynthesize.

While this process has fundamental implications for the Earth, it is far from perfect as a chemical process, scientists say. Some processes prevent plants from capturing and storing more than a small fraction of the sun’s energy that hits their leaves. These processes limit the growth rate of trees and other plants, as well as the amount of carbon dioxide they take in.

Last year the company published in an article not yet peer-reviewed other scientists that during the five months of her stay in the greenhouse, her “entrenched” poplars grew 50% faster from non-genetically modified.

However, forest geneticists are still silent about Living Carbon trees. Researchers typically evaluate trees in limited field trials before moving on to large-scale plantings, explains Andrew Newhouse, who runs the genetically modified chestnut program at SUNY’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. “Their claims seem bold and based on very limited evidence,” he says.

“My experience over the years is that a greenhouse means next to nothing,” notes Steve Strauss, a geneticist at the University of Oregon, who also argues that more data is needed than the productivity of trees in a field.

Currently, Living Carbon is making targeted plantings on private lands where there are fewer procedural and bureaucratic hurdles. The company plans to plant poplars at an abandoned coal mine in Pennsylvania this spring, and the company plans to grow millions more trees by next year.

Source: New York Times.