Berkeley, California, USA
March 27, 2026

Climate change is a defining issue of our times and IGI is creating methods for biological carbon capture – that is, engineering plants and microbes to capture and store atmospheric carbon. Developing methods for enhancing photosynthesis is key to enhancing carbon storage by plants and, in the case of crop plants, simultaneously producing more edible fruits and grains. IGI researchers are already working on editing some genes for key photosynthesis proteins, modifying their ability to capture carbon. Now, they’re tackling it from a different angle: learning how to change how much of a protein a plant makes. 

In a new paper out today in Nature Biotechnology, first authors Evan Groover and David Ding and a team of IGI plant science PIs including Brian Staskwicz, Krishna Nyogi, Dave Savage, and Peggy Lemaux, premier a new cell-based approach for understanding how photosynthesis genes can be turned “up” or “down” in the genomes of key crops. Using plant cells isolated from sorghum leaves, the researchers simulated the effects of thousands of CRISPR edits in the regulatory DNA of photosynthesis genes, showing where and how to edit DNA to boost the levels of important photosynthesis proteins. While the platform focuses on sorghum gene regulation, researchers expect that the findings will be generalizable across common crop species. The data can also be used to benchmark and refine machine learning models trained on crop genomes.

Read more here.

Website: http://innovativegenomics.org/

Published: March 27, 2026