2024-08-22 07:45:12
Scientists have modified trees to directly produce wood with additional useful qualities that would otherwise require wood treatment with energy-intensive and chemical-processing processes that leave behind a lot of waste. Using genetic engineering instead of these industrial technologies is a major cut in pollutant emissions, including carbon dioxide emissions. In fact, this wood can retain carbon for much longer than regular wood.
The breakthrough is the work of a team including, among others, Yiping Qi, Yu Liu and Liangbing Hu, from the University of Maryland in the United States.
The trees genetically modified by the group are poplars.
To avoid having to treat the wood taken from the trees with such energy-intensive processes and harmful chemicals, Liu and his colleagues modified a gene in living poplars, which then, when grown, produced a ready-made tree for use without industrial maintenance.
The modified gene is called 4CL1. This change essentially causes the wood from these poplars to end up having a lignin content 12.8% lower than wood from wood-type poplars. The result is comparable to that obtained with the aforementioned chemical treatments.
Qi and his collaborators grew genetically modified trees alongside non-modified trees in a greenhouse for six months. They did not observe differences in growth rates or significant differences in structure between modified and non-modified trees.
Young genetically modified poplars (on the right) next to non-genetically modified poplars. (Photo: University of Maryland)
To test the viability of genetically modified poplar, the team used to make small samples of highly compressed wood, a material often used in furniture production.
Wood made in this way is about one-fifth of its original thickness. The process increases the density of wood fibers. In natural wood, lignin helps the cells maintain their structure and prevents them from compression. The lower lignin content of chemically treated or genetically modified wood allows the cells to compact to a higher density, increasing the strength of the final product.
To evaluate the performance of genetically modified trees, the team also produced compressed wood from natural poplar, using untreated wood and wood treated with a traditional chemical process to reduce the lignin content.
They found that compressed wood from genetically modified poplar had the same performance as chemically treated natural wood. Both are lighter and more than 1.5 times stronger than compressed natural wood.
The success achieved by Qi and his colleagues opens the door to the production of various wood-based building materials, at a low cost, in an environmentally sustainable way and at a scale that can play an important role in the fight against climate change. look like.
The group presented the technical details of their genetic method to obtain the desired tree in the academic journal Matter, under the title “Genome Edited Trees for High-Performance Trees”. (source: NCYT is a miracle)
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