00;00;11;02 – 00;00;38;05
Voice over
Welcome to Beyond Lab Walls, a podcast from the Salk Institute. Join hosts Isabella Davis and Nicole Mlynaryk on a journey behind the scenes of the renowned research institute in San Diego, California. We’re taking you inside the lab to hear the latest discoveries and cutting-edge neuroscience, plant biology, cancer, aging, and more. Explore the fascinating world of science while listening to the stories of the brilliant minds behind it. Here at Salk, we’re unlocking the secrets of life itself and sharing them beyond lab walls.

00;00;53;22 – 00;01;18;09
Nicole
Hi all. Welcome to another episode of Beyond Lab Walls. I’m your host, Nicole, and I’m excited to get into this very special episode. Before we introduce our guest, I want to welcome today’s co-host, our high school summer intern, Amina Aslam-Mir. Hi, Amina!

Amina
Hi!

00;01;18;12 – 00;01;46;06
Nicole
She has spent the summer working with the cell communications team through the height of Brody High School’s Summer scholars program. It’s been a really important program run through Socks education outreach team. They invite local high schoolers to train at Salk and explore careers in the life sciences. So traditionally, those students worked in labs on campus. But this year, the program was expanded to include internships with the communications team and our Office of Technology Development. I think this has just been a really great way to show students that you can work in science and contribute to this field without actually being a researcher in a lab.

00;01;46;06 – 00;02;07;21
Nicole
So now they’re just a ton of other careers in science, and it’s been really fun to share the world of science communications with Amina this summer. So we’re glad to have you here today. And speaking of unique careers in science, our guest today has one of those who is the program manager of Salk’s Harnessing Plants Initiative, which is a really unique program here at Salk.

00;02;07;24 – 00;02;29;19
Nicole
Of course, you know, the Institute is very well known for its work in health sciences, but our plant biology research has really been blooming, pun intended, in recent years. So the Harnessing Plants initiative is really capturing the power of plants to help fight climate change. We’ll talk all about how their science is being used to save our coastlines and support our food supply.

00;02;29;21 – 00;02;37;03
Nicole
And we’ll be guided through it all by our great guest, Kay Watt. So without further ado, welcome, Kay. We’re so excited to chat with you today.

00;02;37;04 – 00;02;48;20
Kay
Yeah, I’m so excited to be here. Thank you both for having me. I’m looking forward to a very invigorating conversation about the challenges of climate change and also what we can do to mitigate climate change moving forward.

00;02;48;23 – 00;02;52;23
Nicole
Yeah, it’s such important work. So I’m gonna why don’t you get us started?

00;02;52;25 – 00;03;00;18
Amina
Hi. Before we learn more about your science, we’d love to get to know more about you. Where did you grow up and what was your life like there?

00;03;00;21 – 00;03;19;02
Kay
That’s a great question. So I’m not from California originally, although I have been here for over a decade, so I feel like I kind of counted as an honorary California by this point. Whenever I go home to Massachusetts, I only go in the summer because I’m not ready to handle Massachusetts winter again in my lifetime.

00;03;19;07 – 00;03;20;29
Nicole
Yeah, I’m the same.

00;03;21;01 – 00;03;42;11
Kay
But I grew up originally in Massachusetts, so plenty of cold, snowy winters. I was born and spent my childhood south of Boston on the south shore, where I lived in like the suburbs. But I lived right next to a nature preserve, so we would do a lot of nature walks, and we also had our own garden growing up as well.

00;03;42;13 – 00;03;49;22
Kay
We grew corn, we had beans and peas, just whatever we wanted to plant, and of course, pumpkins for Halloween.

00;03;49;28 – 00;03;52;05
Nicole
Yeah. Oh, wow. Lovely.

00;03;52;09 – 00;04;13;18
Kay
Yeah, it was lovely. So I mentioned my family did a lot of nature walks, especially in the winter. We would go on walks in the woods where all of the leaves have fallen off the trees. Maybe there’s a couple of pine trees that are still green, but there’s snow on the ground. So you have kind of a gray sky, like the black bark of these trees, and then a couple green pine trees.

00;04;13;18 – 00;04;37;08
Kay
And then every so often you’d see a couple of like, really beautiful bright red pops of color that were flitting through the canopy, which were cardinals, which was one of my favorite birds growing up. Yeah. But one of the things that I realized, I think, in the last couple of years, is that cardinals aren’t native to Massachusetts. So in the 1900s, they were more native to Kentucky, and they were called a Kentucky cardinal.

00;04;37;11 – 00;05;04;17
Kay
But since then, their range has moved further further north. So when I was growing up in the 1990s, it was in Massachusetts. And now by the 2020s, their range has extended all the way north into Canada. And the reason that they’re moving and changing where they can live is in due part to climate change. So as winters get milder, they can spend their time over winter in these new places.

00;05;04;20 – 00;05;20;15
Nicole
That’s wild because I also have that memory up in Jersey. Those those cold winters and the Cardinals are so beautiful. But yeah, it’s strange to think. Then looking back, that this like, beautiful part of our childhood was actually sort of a warning of climate change, even that, you know, that long ago now.

00;05;20;20 – 00;05;26;12
Kay
Yeah. I don’t know what the opposite of rose-tinted glasses is, but I think that we’re both wearing them a little bit.

00;05;26;14 – 00;05;38;25
Nicole
Oh, man. Wow.

00;05;38;28 – 00;05;42;09
Amina
How did you first get interested in the sciences? Yeah, that’s a good question.

00;05;42;09 – 00;06;04;25
Kay
So I was really interested in nature and agriculture, but I wasn’t interested in science so much until after my bachelor’s degree, when I served in the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps is a very small group of volunteers, United States Citizens who work with the federal government to do outreach in communities in different countries across the world.

00;06;04;25 – 00;06;25;14
Kay
I spent my time in the Peace Corps in Panama more. I lived in a very rural community working on sustainable agriculture, and at the time is like a 22 year old who is fresh out of college. I had the maximum amount of idealism I think I will ever have in my life, and I was very sure and confident that I could do anything I set my mind to.

00;06;25;17 – 00;06;35;22
Kay
So I was very humbled by my experience there where we were working with almost no funding, very little supplies.

00;06;35;24 – 00;06;38;16
Nicole
What did that look like day to day?

00;06;38;19 – 00;06;59;29
Kay
So I lived with a host family for the first three months that I was there, and that started about 6 a.m., you could hear the chickens outside or the pigs that were roaming by. You get up, go outside, because the roof was made out of zinc and it would heat up very quickly in the sun, and the house is made out of cinder blocks, and there was no cooling down inside the house.

00;07;00;05 – 00;07;50;22
Kay
You spent most of your time outside until sunset. So a lot of the time was just spent in a sitting with people, chatting with them, getting to know them, getting to understand them, and building relationships. Which from my perspective, as somebody who is very motivated to sit down and get the work done, seemed like, not a waste of time, but seemed very slow in comparison to what I thought I would be doing. But it ended up being the most important part—building those relationships, hearing perspectives, understanding what people think they need. Because usually what they think they need, they’re the experts in their own lives. So they’re the ones who do know and can tell you, rather than you coming in with an idea and kind of saying, this is what you need to do.

00;07;50;25 – 00;08;19;03
Kay
So one of the main problems that I was brought in to solve was helping to increase the health of coffee trees in the town itself, because coffee was kind of the exported good. I worked with farmers specifically in sustainable agriculture, mostly working on coffee farms to prune trees in a certain way so that pathogens or different bacteria that were present naturally would have less of an opportunity to infect and take hold in these trees.

00;08;20;01 – 00;08;41;20
Kay
But at the same time, I did some work with the school and with people to be able to set up their own gardens, because where we lived, people would grow subsistence food. So that meant they would have their own rice paddies, they would grow plantain, they would grow banana. So that’s kind of what people relied on to be able to sustain themselves and their children.

00;08;41;23 – 00;09;12;21
Kay
But unfortunately, even though it’s a tropical country and you don’t have harsh winters, a lot of food varieties or crop varieties couldn’t actually thrive there. So if people wanted to eat like a tomato or a cucumber, you could plant them and hope that it did well. And nine times out of ten, it would not do well. So to come to a disease that it was facing or there would be an extreme rain event, or there just wasn’t enough nutrients in the soil itself because it’s a really thick red clay rainforest soil, which is very nutrient-poor.

00;09;12;23 – 00;09;30;07
Kay
So if people did want to eat something like a tomato or cucumber, they would have to send somebody in their family three hours on the bus to a town to be able to pick them up and then bring them all the way back. So there was not a lot of food security in terms of nutritious food beyond what they could grow right there.

00;09;30;10 – 00;09;53;07
Nicole
Yeah. I’m just, I’m thinking about your work now and how it contributes to sustaining our food supply and stabilizing crops. When I think about agriculture, a lot of Americans have a particular idea of what that looks like, what a farm looks like, what agriculture looks like. And yet a lot of folks like this in Panama, these subsistence farmers or these farmers, that agriculture is their livelihood.

00;09;53;09 – 00;10;18;14
Nicole
Based on what you’re saying, it’s affected by yields every year and by if a pathogen comes in and wipes out your crop, like that really affects your livelihood. So I guess as we’re going to be thinking about ways that our climate and human activity is changing farming practices, and it’s not just for mega farms that we have in the U.S. We’re really talking about individual lives that rely on the stability of their crops.

00;10;18;16 – 00;10;23;22
Nicole
I could see how you seeing that firsthand would definitely motivate your your journey a bit.

00;10;23;23 – 00;10;43;02
Kay
Yeah. Thank you for taking me all the way back to complete the loop. I just told you this whole story about me scoring to not get back to why I got into science. So let me close that loop. So I had that experience. But I knew also that over the last, you know, couple of hundreds of years, people have really been focused on plant breeding.

00;10;43;02 – 00;11;05;11
Kay
And now with the advent of genetics and genomics technology, plant breeding is a highly commercialized, very competitive field, especially for food crops. So although these plants are not doing well in this environment, it’s very possible to be able to create plants that can thrive in that environment and that can support the nutrition of the families that live there and that are growing them.

00;11;05;13 – 00;11;15;21
Kay
So when I came back to the U.S., I decided to get a second bachelor’s degree and then go straight into a PhD in genetics and genomics, focusing on plant breeding.

00;11;15;24 – 00;11;19;25
Nicole
Wow. And this is all without a science background? You hadn’t studied science formally before?

00;11;19;25 – 00;11;26;00
Kay
No science background at all. Just a love of nature and of agriculture, but no formal science training.

00;11;26;01 – 00;11;40;23
Nicole
Yeah, well, again, another indicator to Amina here and our other, high school interns that, you know, change is possible. You can always pivot and alter your course when a new career goal comes to mind.

00;11;40;25 – 00;11;57;29
Kay
And you only know what you know at the time. So you are only interested in what you know. So as soon as you learn something new, a lot of people, I think, have that feeling of, oh, well, I’ve invested so much in a certain way, or I had made a certain plan. I don’t want to change it because I want to stay, you know, focus on what I thought I wanted to do.

00;11;57;29 – 00;12;11;10
Kay
But as you learn more things are totally fine to pivot. I think it brings a lot more richness to people’s lives to be able to be curious and investigative and not just like live in a straight line, but to kind of go into more of a meandering, scenic route, you know?

00;12;11;10 – 00;12;27;03
Nicole
Absolutely. I’m sure you you went into that PhD program with just a very unique perspective and experience compared to some of the other students, maybe, who had just been studying biology and genetics their entire lives, you know, preparing for this.

00;12;44;02 – 00;12;47;19
Nicole
Can you tell us a little more about your experience. What were you studying there?

00;12;47;21 – 00;13;09;08
Kay
Yeah. So I ended up coming to California for my PhD. I was accepted into UC Davis and wanted to work specifically on plant science. So based on my interest in what I had seen in Panama, I wanted to study climate adaptation in crops. And I worked specifically in chickpea, which is a really important crop worldwide. So it’s very rich in protein.

00;13;09;08 – 00;13;32;12
Kay
A lot of people grow it for subsistence farming. It’s considered extremely important for human health and food security. And I ended up studying it specifically to understand climate adaptation for chickpea. So how can we still grow chickpea in a climate where it’s extremely hot, where there’s less water or the water that we have is dealing with some degree of salinity?

00;13;32;12 – 00;13;58;06
Kay
So there’s added salt. So for me, it involves growing these different varieties of chickpea that were collected from around the world. And I was growing them in different fields in the Central Valley, specifically focusing on areas where it would get very, very hot, to be able to see how do these plants react under stress? How many grains are they going to produce at the end of the season?

00;13;58;08 – 00;14;22;03
Kay
And then the plants that were the most successful? And I wanted to better understand and the genetics behind this tolerance. So I ended up investigating that for a while, and then at the same time, starting a breeding program for chickpea, which involves crossing the varieties that are performing the best to be able to create a variety that hopefully has the strength of both of the parents.

00;14;22;06 – 00;14;29;18
Nicole
So you’re cross-pollinating different varieties in the hopes of producing this new generation that has different, better genes. Is that right?

00;14;29;20 – 00;14;31;05
Kay
That’s exactly correct. Yes.

00;14;31;05 – 00;14;36;27
Nicole
How did all of that then guide your next steps? And how did you end up at Salk?

00;14;36;29 – 00;14;57;00
Kay
Well, what I took away from that experience is that it’s one thing to be able to complete some basic science. It’s another thing to be able to apply it in a meaningful way. So at the time when I was working on my PhD, I was also taking MBA classes, also at Davis, and it was a very different experience than going through the science.

00;14;57;00 – 00;15;20;28
Kay
The science is very rigid. It has to be by the nature of being able to uncover something new. You have to have a strenuous application of science in these highly controlled environments. And then business school is the complete opposite of that. A lot of the time it’s very messy. You have to think about people, about motivations, about policies, about technology.

00;15;20;28 – 00;15;41;12
Kay
So you have to be able to take everything involved to be able to essentially solve a lot of these business problems that we were dealing with in these classes. And I really liked it. I liked that it was very messy and that there wasn’t a right answer. So I ended up wanting to combine the experience I had in these courses with what I had come to Davis to study in my plant background.

00;15;41;14 – 00;15;52;08
Nicole
So I can see how that led to to your role here at Salk as the Program Manager of HPI. Before we go into kind of the details of the program, can you tell us a little about your role?

00;15;52;10 – 00;16;15;12
Kay
So I work with the now seven different professors that make up HPI along with their labs, and I work alongside them to be able to understand and guide what our strategy looks like currently and then into the future, as well as to coordinate and execute on logistics, which is a nice way of saying: I fill out a lot of paperwork.

00;16;15;15 – 00;16;21;19
Nicole
What is the Harnessing Plants Initiative and what problem is it trying to solve?

00;16;21;22 – 00;16;46;20
Kay
Yeah, the Harnessing Plants Initiative is focused specifically on climate change mitigation. So if we start thinking about, you know, climate has been changing throughout the lifetime of the planet, throughout the history of people on the planet. Climate change is happening, but it’s happening at a very slow pace. So about like a third of a degree Celsius, maybe a half a degree Fahrenheit, which isn’t a big change over a thousand years.

00;16;46;22 – 00;17;17;11
Kay
But what we’re seeing now, now that we’ve started really emitting carbon dioxide in significant amounts, we’ve seen a 1.5°C change in about 200 years, which is super accelerated. That change would take about 5000 years otherwise, according to these natural fluctuations that we’ve been seeing. But now it’s really ramped up. And right now we are at the 1.5°C mark that previously the United Nations set as the maximum safe allowable amount of climate change.

00;17;17;13 – 00;17;22;23
Kay
But we haven’t really reduced our emissions in any appreciable way. If anything, they’ve gotten higher.

00;17;22;25 – 00;17;33;20
Nicole
Salk can’t exactly, change the global emissions, but we are kind of looking to impact things on the other end in carbon sequestration. So can you tell us a little bit about what that means?

00;17;33;22 – 00;17;51;14
Kay
Yes. So carbon sequestration is taking carbon out of the atmosphere. So there’s been a lot of talk about reducing emissions. That’s part of like a big part of the climate change conversation, but also carbon dioxide removal is another part of it. And that’s exactly where the Harnessing Plants Initiative is located.

00;17;51;16 – 00;18;10;29
Nicole
So plants are naturally doing that. And again, this initiative is looking to in similar ways to your previous projects. You’re looking to develop new generations of plants that can do this even better. And I know that there’s kind of two, two pronged approach. Can you tell us a little bit about what those main goals of the initiative are?

00;18;11;03 – 00;18;42;04
Kay
Yeah. So we’re focused on two different programs. One is our coastal plant restoration program. And then our other program is called crops, which is CO2 removal on a planetary scale. But that one’s focused on specifically working with crops that are produced over vast amounts of land globally. So this would be considered kind of commodity crops or crops that are really important for humans to be able to have enough, you know, calories to be able to survive.

00;18;42;04 – 00;18;53;26
Kay
They include like rice, wheat, corn, sorghum, soy, and canola.

00;18;53;29 – 00;19;28;11
Voice over
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00;19;28;14 – 00;19;51;08
Kay
Coastal plant restoration is focused on examining these populations to be able to see if they have some of the traits that we’re interested in that can contribute to these plants sequestering more carbon out of the atmosphere. And those traits involve increase root biomass, which is just the total amount of roots that are generated by a plant, increased depth of those roots.

00;19;51;08 – 00;20;11;23
Kay
So how deep can they grow into the soil? And then are they producing specific molecules that we’re interested in. These molecules are carbon rich and they’re very durable. So after the plant dies and it degrades and kind of the molecules are left in the soil, these molecules are known to endure for quite a long period of time.

00;20;11;26 – 00;20;28;05
Nicole
So by selecting for plants that have some of these traits, these larger, deeper roots or more of these carbon sequestering molecules, then those versions of the plants would be able to not only take in more carbon, but actually store it in the soil for longer. Is that right?

00;20;28;06 – 00;20;53;18
Kay
Exactly. And a lot of our wetlands have been degraded, especially in California. We’ve lost about half of our wetlands through development, but there’s also an effort to be able to restore these wetlands. So by identifying populations which are native to California or to other areas where they’re doing restoration work, and to be able to say these populations are specifically suited for also increased carbon dioxide removal.

00;20;53;18 – 00;20;58;24
Kay
We can inform these restoration projects by providing these populations to them.

00;20;58;24 – 00;21;03;10
Nicole
So you can choose those plants to be the ones that we’re restoring these areas with.

00;21;03;16 – 00;21;07;23
Kay
Exactly, exactly. We like to call it genetically informed restoration.

00;21;07;29 – 00;21;28;00
Nicole
So cool. And then on the other end, you’re looking at agricultural crops and thinking about ways to help these crops that are so important to our food supply across the world. Be also, again, more resilient to climate change, but also kind of do some work while they’re growing. Right? Helping us sequester this carbon even more. So is it similar traits that you’re looking for there?

00;21;30;16 – 00;21;48;13
Kay
That’s exactly right. So we’re looking for similar traits again. Like are they producing more roots? Are they producing roots that can grow deeper into the soil? And are they producing these very durable molecules. And I can give you kind of like a story of what that looks like. And we can go through the process a little bit. Yeah.

00;21;48;14 – 00;21;49;04
Nicole
Absolutely.

00;21;49;04 – 00;22;12;23
Kay
So we’ll start with a project. Let’s say it happened a few years ago. And then scientists wanted to understand what exactly causes a plant to grow deeper roots than other plants within that same species. So the scientists my first work with a model organism like Arabidopsis thaliana, which for the plant people is our equivalent of the white lab mouse.

00;22;12;26 – 00;22;32;28
Kay
So within Arabidopsis and there’s a lot of different pools of diversity. And scientists have access to these pools. They’re able to observe and phenotype them for their exposure. And then they’re taking notes on them. They’re seeing that some of these roots are naturally growing larger than others, even though these plants are all exposed to the exact same uniform environment.

00;22;32;28 – 00;22;54;10
Kay
They’re in a very curious about why that’s happening. So they found the phenotype that they’re looking for, but they don’t know the gene that’s linked to it yet. Right. So in parallel, they’re going and they’re sequencing the DNA of each of these populations or varieties, so that now they have two different pieces of information. They have the genotypic information and the phenotypic information.

00;22;54;13 – 00;23;14;27
Kay
And then they combine them and look to see if there are any patterns that stand out to them. So an example would be well, look at all these large rooted varieties. The one thing that they have in common is that there is a gene missing that is present in all of the small rooted varieties. And at that point, you get very curious about that one gene.

00;23;14;27 – 00;23;34;07
Kay
So what does the absence of that gene mean? The scientists would then go on to do experiments, specifically working on that gene to test if it is the one gene that’s responsible for this difference between the two subpopulations that the two groups of, like big rooted and small rooted plants. And once they have that, then it gets really exciting.

00;23;34;07 – 00;23;57;11
Kay
So let’s say that they do have this gene and it is responsible for increased root size in Arabidopsis. That’s great. We’ve learned something for basic science. But how do we apply that in crops. So now we go through a team of bioinformaticians that have similar genetic data about all of the crop species that we work with. And they start to say, well, is this gene present in this crop?

00;23;57;11 – 00;24;13;23
Kay
Is it present in this crop? Is it present in this crop? If it is, can we start to work with it to be able to change it? So if it is present then we can go into the species, let’s say canola and say okay, well in canola we found a gene that looks very much like the gene in Arabidopsis.

00;24;13;26 – 00;24;33;28
Kay
Let’s edit it with Crispr. And what that means is to go in and change a few nucleotides. So an example I like to use is let’s say that the gene says CAT. We can change it to BAT or we can change it to CHAT. So we’re just changing a few nucleotides within that gene so that it’s no longer operational.

00;24;34;01 – 00;24;58;23
Kay
It speeds up the process from traditional breeding, which can take anywhere from 5 to 10 years to a couple of years with these new genetic modification techniques. And then we grow that plant and we phenotype it to see if it does indeed have that same phenotype that we observed in her would office in the model organism. And then also to make sure that there aren’t any unintended changes.

00;24;58;23 – 00;25;34;10
Kay
So maybe that gene is responsible for some other aspect of the plant that wasn’t so dead previously. And if it is that I’ll show up and we’ll say, okay, this gene was very interesting. Maybe we need to modify it so it’s only not expressed in the roots or maybe it’s not a good candidate for us. So we’ve repeated this hundreds of times across many different experiments and with different crops to be able to kind of come up with this very long list of promising gene candidates that we’re now working on in many different crop species, it’s not trivial to build a platform that can handle tens of thousands of plants and to be able to

00;25;34;12 – 00;26;20;12
Kay
phenotype them for many different traits, but it’s what we’ve been able to do over the past five years and is really exciting that now we’re at a place where we are making even more high throughput, which means that we can look at more phenotypes, more plants, more species over time. So we’re really accelerating the pace of the science here, which is needed because climate change is an imminent threat.

00;26;20;15 – 00;26;42;09
Nicole
So far, we’ve been talking about different ways to produce new varieties through these cross pollination techniques, breeding things out in the field. But like, you just alluded to, it takes a long time. Each generation of those plants has to grow and create new generations. You’re not really in control of what genes that next generation gets like, how much better it really gets in that one generation.

00;26;42;09 – 00;27;03;23
Nicole
So it might take many generations before you really get that collection of traits that you’re looking for. And that sounds very different than using Crispr, these new techniques. You already kind of know what gene you’re looking for, and you can go directly into the DNA of these plants and get the genetic effect that you’re looking for. So that’s a major transition in the field.

00;27;03;25 – 00;27;26;12
Kay
It is I think it’s really revolutionized what’s possible in terms of agriculture and plant science. And I think that’s what we need at this point. We’re again, we’re racing against the clock for climate change. So being able to use these techniques and that these techniques are available to us at this time is kind of, a really beautiful moment of serendipity for us.

00;27;26;14 – 00;27;48;26
Kay
So where we are now is, let’s say this researcher was doing this a couple of years ago, which they were. Now we have the canola plant has more biomass, and that’s being tested now in the greenhouse. And what that means for us is the next stage is once it’s fully evaluated for all of the traits that we care about, the next step is to be able to assess it in a field.

00;27;48;26 – 00;28;16;19
Kay
So it works great in a greenhouse. But how about in the actual agricultural field where the farmer will be growing? It? Let’s test it there too. So we work with commercial companies, nonprofits and NGOs to be able to take the plant from the greenhouse to the field, to be able to test it so that it can reach its final step with us before it finally goes on to be commercialized and used at scale, which is where it will have that real impact.

00;28;16;21 – 00;28;23;01
Nicole
Yeah, amazing. What are the next steps for the Harnessing Plants Initiative? When will we see these plants out in the world?

00;28;23;03 – 00;28;53;03
Kay
Well, we’re hoping that right now with our earliest plant varieties where we’ve been testing these improved varieties, where we’ve improved their ability to sequester additional carbon, we’re expecting that those will be commercialized in a few years, let’s say around five years. So for carbon sequestration or carbon removal, working with a nature based system once it’s available can be done at a scale that rivals anything else that’s possible within carbon removal.

00;28;53;05 – 00;29;12;17
Kay
So, for instance, if you have to build a factory that’s pulling carbon dioxide mechanically out of the air every time you build a factory, you have to start from scratch. You have to build another factory, and another one. But a plant, let’s say you have a corn, a maize plant. You have one seed, but at the end of the season you’re going to have hundreds of seeds just from that plant.

00;29;12;17 – 00;29;21;17
Kay
So if you continue to scale that, it scales exponentially over time, which is one of the things that we’re really excited about and is one of the things that plants do exceptionally well.

00;29;21;23 – 00;29;39;26
Nicole
Yeah, we talk about sustainable, renewable. I mean, the plants are regenerating themselves. If we can get them to be these tools for us, then that’s an amazing and probably a lower cost solution than creating a lot of these huge carbon sequestration factories.

00;29;39;27 – 00;30;00;05
Kay
Yeah, one of the really nice things about sequestering carbon in the soil is that when there is an increased carbon content in the soil, it makes the soil healthier, too. So it’s not just taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it in the soil. That’s not the end of the story. Now that the carbon is present in the soil, the soil is more resilient.

00;30;00;05 – 00;30;21;21
Kay
It can hold more water, more nutrients are available. So by building up this bank of carbon in the soil, we’re creating farmlands that are more fertile. Where people where maybe if they don’t have access to fertilizers or other synthetic means that they’re going to be naturally building up the soil by using these varieties, which is really exciting.

00;30;21;21 – 00;30;22;00
Kay
Yeah.

00;30;22;00 – 00;30;28;10
Nicole
Extra bonuses.

00;30;28;13 – 00;30;34;23
Nicole
You.

00;30;34;25 – 00;30;40;26
Amina
Earlier you were talking about, like, a carbon sequestering factory. That was an analogy, right? That’s not a real thing?

00;30;40;27 – 00;30;41;24
Kay
Oh, it is a real thing.

00;30;42;00 – 00;30;46;07
Nicole
It’s a real thing. Yeah.

Amina
Oh. What is that?

00;30;46;07 – 00;31;06;25
Kay
The original factories were built, in northern Europe, where they could use geothermal energy to be able to power the factory. It’s basically like a series of fans that have, a certain technology associated with them where they can actually just capture the carbon dioxide out of the air. But it’s very energy intensive to do.

00;31;06;29 – 00;31;26;00
Nicole
Yeah, it’s it’s amazing that we’re getting to use plants themselves and create these versions that are just these optimized versions of what they’re already doing to sequester more of this carbon and to stabilize our our food supply, which with a growing population, it’s clear that this is, a major goal that we need to be working on right now.

00;31;26;07 – 00;31;41;01
Nicole
It’s just so cool to see this go from kind of that really basic science at the bench to this product that can really be revolutionizing industries all over the world and really changing lives, like those farmers that you worked with in Panama.

00;31;41;03 – 00;32;01;04
Kay
It’s one of the things that is definitely a life passion for me, and I’m really blessed every day to be able to work with scientists and researchers and professors who are so focused on this problem, it makes me feel like, you know, although we are facing some really big challenges, there are also a lot of people that are working on all of those challenges at the same time.

00;32;01;04 – 00;32;25;03
Nicole
It’s such important work we’ve had, and we continue to have such an impact on human disease and the work we’re doing there to support human health. And in that way. But like you’re saying, one of the biggest issues of our time is how climate change is going to affect our health. And it’s just amazing that we’re getting to tackle that and be part of this conversation and use our basic science to have such an important impact that way.

00;32;25;03 – 00;32;48;22
Nicole
So it’s so exciting to learn more about this and to see this program continue to grow. So if our listeners would like to learn more about the Harnessing Plants Initiative, you can visit our website at Salk.edu. And again, I want to thank so much our great co-host Amina and of course our wonderful guest Kay.

00;32;48;23 – 00;32;56;09
Nicole
It’s just been so great to learn more about you and your work. And I look forward to sharing more science with all of you next time.

00;32;56;11 – 00;33;20;06
Kay
Yeah, it’s been a pleasure to be here with you, Nicole. I’m Anna and to chat a little bit about, you know, my life and also about the great work that’s being done here at the Salk Institute.

00;33;20;09 – 00;33;50;22
Voice over
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