This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Hello hello! This week in The Spark, we’re taking a look back at one of my favorite sessions from our ClimateTech conference last week, from a chapter we called “Cleaning Your Plate.” In the session, I sat down with Pamela Ronald, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Davis. She’s been working for years on helping rice survive floods, and now she’s turning her attention to using advanced genetics for carbon removal on farmland. Genetics and plants Scientists have a wide range of tools at their disposal to influence how plants grow. From standard genetic engineering to more sophisticated gene editing tools like CRISPR, we have more power than ever to influence what traits we want in crops. But genetic tweaking isn’t anything new. “Virtually everything we eat has been improved using some sort o...
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