A new AI tool may speed up plants’ dirty solution to cleaner air

Salk roots project fights carbon

The Salk Institute received an $18 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund for a three-year project called ROOTS, which will test whether soybeans with deeper root systems can pull more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it in the soil.

Key points Salk roots project fights carbon
  1. The Salk Institute received an $18 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund for a three-year project called ROOTS, which will test whether soybeans with deeper root systems can pull more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it in the soil.
  2. Biologist Wolfgang Busch says roots are central to climate challenges, and the team will stress-test genetically altered soybean plants in the field while building an AI tool called RootGPT to speed up the research.
  3. Busch estimates that if farmers widely adopted the deeper-rooted crops, they could remove one gigaton of carbon each year, though he cautions that lab and greenhouse results can fail in the real world.
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