Harnessing plant-microbial partnerships to address major sustainability challenges
Partnerships between plant roots and fungi play a key role in the photosynthetic capacity, carbon budget and environmental tolerances of plant communities. These partnerships could be harnessed to address major challenges, such as climate mitigation and food security, but technical barriers limit the realization of this potential. This project will develop an open-access toolkit to enable researchers to identify and manipulate fungal genes that underpin key ecosystem functions. Resulting investigations could have wide reaching implications for the sustainability of natural and managed plant systems.
Research News & Insights
Kabir Peay wants to leverage the relationship between plants and the beneficial fungi that colonize their roots to help ecosystems weather climate change.
Stanford researchers are working to reveal secrets of a massive, intricate underground fungal network. The resulting knowledge could help scientists engineer fungi-plant interactions to store large amounts of carbon underground and break down toxins, such as plastics and pesticides, among other advances.
Environmental Venture and Realizing Environmental Innovation grants foster interdisciplinary solutions.