Resilient and environmentally sustainable engineered crops to address climate change

Introduction

Current global warming, caused by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (in particular CO2), is expected to rise from 2.5°C to 4°C by the end of the century. Consequently, agriculture is faced with the urging needs of increasing CO2 sequestration, coping with adverse weather and disastrous events (i.e., droughts, heat waves, fire, and flooding), and feeding an ever-growing world population projected at 9.7 billion in 2050.

Challenges in Agriculture

Future crops must serve as more efficient carbon sinks to mitigate climate change, plus have higher resilience and productivity to feed the global population.

1. Increase CO2 sequestration
2. Cope with adverse weather events
3. Feed a growing population

Project Overview

Crop4Clima will develop first-of-a-kind canola and rapeseed lines able to assimilate 60% more CO2 through photorespiration, requiring 20% less water, improving biomass per hectare, and still maintaining high oil content values as required for canola-derived products. No commercial crops of that kind exist.

Innovative Approach

To reach such a product, we will improve and bring to commercial use a disruptive synthetic metabolic pathway, the TaCo pathway, which turns photorespiration into a CO2-fixing instead of a CO2-releasing process. This leads to increased net carbon uptake under agronomical standard and drought field conditions.

Importance of Canola and Rapeseed

Canola and rapeseed are major crops in the EU and worldwide. Notably, our technology has commercial prospects to be introduced in other C3 crops such as soybean, cotton, rice, and more, based on photosynthetic and genomic similarity.

Future Prospects

The success of the technology implementation in rapeseed will allow us to establish a start-up seed company aiming to produce and sell high oil seeds with a low carbon footprint.

Business Development

In addition, within the framework of the program, we will develop an innovative business plan taking into consideration how the food value chain is evolving to cope with food supply and climate change. This will include signing a pre-commercial agreement with our industrial partners for the development of our engineered crops up to TRL9 and building trust in the proposed solution.