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      in Energy

      Will the charging networks arrive in time?

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      For many owners of electric vehicles (EVs), or for prospective EV owners, a thorny problem is where to charge them. Even as legacy automakers increasingly invest in manufacturing more all-electric cars and trucks, there is not a dense network of charging stations serving many types of vehicles, which would make EVs more convenient to use.

      “We’re going to have the ability to produce and deliver millions of EVs,” said MIT Professor Charles Fine at the final session this semester of the MIT Mobility Forum. “It’s not clear we’re going to have the ability to charge them. That’s a huge, huge mismatch.”

      Indeed, making EV charging stations as ubiquitous as gas stations could spur a major transition within the entire U.S. vehicle fleet. While the automaker Tesla has built a network of almost 2,000 charging stations across the U.S., and might make some interoperable with other makes of vehicles, independent companies trying to develop a business out of it are still trying to gain significant traction.

      “They don’t have a business model that works yet,” said Fine, the Chrysler Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, speaking of startup firms. “They haven’t figured out their supply chains. They haven’t figured out the customer value proposition. They haven’t figured out their technology standards. It’s a very, very immature domain.”

      The May 12 event drew nearly 250 people as well as an online audience. The MIT Mobility Forum is a weekly set of talks and discussions during the academic year, ranging widely across the field of transportation and design. It is hosted by the MIT Mobility Initiative, which works to advance sustainable, accessible, and safe forms of transportation.

      Fine is a prominent expert in the areas of operations strategy, entrepreneurship, and supply chain management. He has been at MIT Sloan for over 30 years; from 2015 to 2022, he also served as the founding president, dean, and CEO of the Asia School of Business in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a collaboration between MIT Sloan and Bank Negara Malaysia. Fine is also author of “Faster, Smarter, Greener: The Future of the Car and Urban Mobility” (MIT Press, 2017).

      In Fine’s remarks, he discussed the growth stages of startup companies, highlighting three phases where firms try to “nail it, scale it, and sail it” — that is, figure out the concept and workability of their enterprise, try to expand it, and then operate as a larger company. The charging-business startups are still somewhere within the first of these phases.

      At the same time, the established automakers have announced major investments in EVs — a collective $860 billion over the next decade, Fine noted. Among others, Ford says it will invest $50 billion in EV production by 2026; General Motors plans to spend $35 billion on EVs by 2025; and Toyota has announced it will invest $35 billion in EV manufacturing by 2030.

      With all these vehicles potentially coming to market, Fine suggested, the crux of the issue is a kind of “chicken and egg” problem between EVs and the network needed to support them.

      “If you’re a startup company in the charging business, if there aren’t many EVs out there, you’re not going to be making much money, and that doesn’t give you the capital to continue to invest and grow,” Fine said. “So, they need to wait until they have revenue before they can grow further. On the other hand, why should anybody buy an electric car if they don’t think they’re going to be able to charge it?”

      Those living in single-family homes can install chargers. But many others are not in that situation, Fine noted: “For people who don’t have fixed parking spaces and have to rely on the public network, there is this chicken-and-egg problem. They can’t buy an EV unless they know how they’re going to be able to charge it, and charging companies can’t build out their networks unless they know how they’re going to get their revenue.”

      The event featured a question-and-answer session and audience discussion, with a range of questions, and comments from some industry veterans, including Robin Chase SM ’86, the co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar. She expressed some optimism that startup charging companies will be able to get traction in the nascent market before long.

      “The right companies can learn very fast,” Chase said. “There’s no reason why they can’t correct those scaling problems in short-ish order.”

      In answer to other audience questions, Fine noted some of the challenges that will have to be addressed by independent charging firms, such as unified standards and interoperability among automakers and charging stations.

      “For a driver to have to have six different apps, or [their] car doesn’t fit in the plug here or there, or my software doesn’t talk to my credit card … connectivity, standards, technical issues need to be worked out as well,” Fine said.

      There are also varying regulatory issues, including grid policies and what consumers can be billed for, which have to be worked out on a state-by-state basis, meaning that even modest-size startups will have to have knowledgeable and productive legal departments.

      All of which makes it possible, as Fine suggested, that the large legacy automakers will start investing more heavily in the charging business in the near future. Mercedes, he noted, just announced in January that it is entering into a partnership with charging firms ChargePoint and MN8 Energy to develop about 400 charging stations across North America by 2027. By necessity, others might have to follow suit if they want to protect their massive planned investments in the EV sector.

      “I’m not in the business of telling [automakers] what to do, but I do think they have a lot at risk,” Fine said. “They’re spending billions and billions of dollars to produce these cars, and I don’t think they can afford an epic failure [if] people don’t buy them because there’s no charging infrastructure. If they’re waiting for the startups to build out rapidly, then they may be waiting longer than they hope to wait.” More

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      in Environment

      3 Questions: Can disused croplands help mitigate climate change?

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      As the world struggles to meet internationally agreed targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, methods of removing carbon dioxide such as reforestation of cleared areas have become an increasingly important strategy. But little attention has been paid to the potential for abandoned or marginal croplands to be restored to natural vegetation as an additional carbon sink, say MIT assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering César Terrer, recent visiting MIT doctoral student Stephen M. Bell, and six others, in a recent open-access paper in the journal Nature Communications. Here, Terrer and Bell explain the potential use of these “post-agricultural” lands to help in the fight against damaging climate change.

      Q: How significant is the potential of unused agricultural lands as a carbon sink to help mitigate climate change?

      Bell: We know of these huge instances of land abandonment and post-agricultural succession throughout history, like following the collapse of major cities from ancient Mesopotamia to the Mayans. And when the Europeans arrived in the Americas in the 15th century, so many people died and so much forest grew back on abandoned farmland that it helped cool the entire planet and was potentially a driver of the coldest part of the so-called “Little Ice Age” period.

      Today, we have abandoned farmland all over the Mediterranean region, where I did my PhD field work. As young people left rural areas for the cities throughout the 20th century, farmers couldn’t pass on their land to anyone, and the land succeeded back into shrub lands and forests. The biggest recent example of abandonment is for sure the collapse of the Soviet Union, where an estimated 60 million hectares of forest regrew when support for collective farming stopped, resulting in one of the largest carbon sinks ever attributed to a single event.

      So, when we look back at the past, we know there’s potential. Of course, these are huge events, and no one is proposing to replicate anything like that. We need to use land for multiple purposes, but looking back at these big examples, we know there is potential for abandoned or restored agricultural land to be carbon sinks. And so that tells us to dig deeper into this question and get a better idea of realistic scenarios, a better understanding of the climate change mitigation potential of agricultural cessation in the most strategic places.

      Terrer: More than 115 billion tons of carbon have been lost from soils due to agricultural practices that disturb soil integrity — such as tilling, monoculture farming, removing crop residue, excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides, and over-grazing. To put this into perspective, the amount of carbon lost is equivalent to the total CO2 emissions ever produced in the United States.

      Our current research synthesizes field data from thousands of experiments, aiming to understand the factors that influence soil carbon accrual in abandoned croplands transitioning back to forests or natural grasslands. We’re working to quantify the potential for carbon sequestration in these soils over 30-, 50-, and 100-year time frames and mapping the areas with the greatest potential for carbon storage. This includes both increases in soil carbon and in vegetation biomass.

      Q: What are some of the key uncertainties in evaluating this potential for unused cropland to serve as a carbon sink, and how could those uncertainties be addressed?

      Bell: We use this word uncertainties in two ways. Specifically, the longevity of potential recarbonization, and the intensity of the potential recarbonization. Those are two factors, two aspects that we need to quantify to reduce our uncertainty.

      So, how long will the land recarbonize, regardless of the intensity? If the carbon level is going up, that’s good. If there’s more carbon increasing in the soil, we know that it came from somewhere, it came from the atmosphere. But how long does that happen? We know soil can get saturated. It can reach its carbon capacity limit, it won’t continue to increase the carbon stock, and the recarbonization curve will flatten out. When does that happen? Is it after a hundred years? Is it after 20 years?

      But the world’s soils are very diverse and complex, so what might be true in one place is not true in another place. It may take a longer time to reach saturation for more fertile soils in the Midwest U.S. than less fertile soils in the Southwest, for example. Alternatively, sometimes soils in drier areas like in the Southwest may never reach true saturation if they are degraded and have stalled recovery following abandonment.

      The second uncertainty is intensity: How high on the y-axis on the chart of recarbonization does saturation occur? With the analogy comparing U.S. soils, you might have a relatively huge carbon increase on an abandoned farm in the Southwest, but because the soil is not very carbon-rich it’s not a large increase in absolute terms. In the Midwest, there might only be a small relative increase, but that increase could be much more in total than in the Southwest. These are just nuances to keep in mind as we look at this at the global scale.

      These nuances are essentially uncertainties. Soil carbon responses to agricultural land abandonment is complicated, and unfortunately it hasn’t been studied in much detail so far. We need to reduce those uncertainties to get a better understanding of the recarbonization potential. This is easier said than done because not only do we have these temporal data uncertainties, but we also have spatial uncertainties. We don’t have very good maps of past and present post-agricultural landscapes.

      Q: Can this potential use of post-agricultural lands be implemented without putting global food supplies at risk? How can these needs be balanced?

      Terrer: As to whether utilizing post-agricultural lands for carbon sequestration can be implemented without jeopardizing global food supplies, and how to balance these needs, our recent research provides valuable insights.

      The challenge, of course, lies in balancing cropland restoration for climate mitigation with food security for a growing global population. Abandoned croplands represent an opportunity for carbon sequestration without impacting active agricultural lands. However, the available area of abandoned croplands is insufficient to make a substantial impact on climate mitigation on its own.

      Thus, our proposal also emphasizes the importance of closing yield gaps, which involves increasing crop production per hectare to its theoretical limits. This would enable us to maintain or even increase global crop yields using only a fraction of the currently cultivated area, allowing the remaining land to be dedicated to climate mitigation efforts. By pursuing this strategy, we estimate that over half of the amount of soil carbon lost so far due to agriculture could be recovered, while ensuring food security for the world’s population. More

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      in Environment

      J-WAFS announces 2023 seed grant recipients

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      Today, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) announced its ninth round of seed grants to support innovative research projects at MIT. The grants are designed to fund research efforts that tackle challenges related to water and food for human use, with the ultimate goal of creating meaningful impact as the world population continues to grow and the planet undergoes significant climate and environmental changes.Ten new projects led by 15 researchers from seven different departments will be supported this year. The projects address a range of challenges by employing advanced materials, technology innovations, and new approaches to resource management. The new projects aim to remove harmful chemicals from water sources, develop monitoring and other systems to help manage various aquaculture industries, optimize water purification materials, and more.“The seed grant program is J-WAFS’ flagship grant initiative,” says J-WAFS executive director Renee J. Robins. “The funding is intended to spur groundbreaking MIT research addressing complex issues that are challenging our water and food systems. The 10 projects selected this year show great promise, and we look forward to the progress and accomplishments these talented researchers will make,” she adds.The 2023 J-WAFS seed grant researchers and their projects are:Sara Beery, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), is building the first completely automated system to estimate the size of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest (PNW).Salmon are a keystone species in the PNW, feeding human populations for the last 7,500 years at least. However, overfishing, habitat loss, and climate change threaten extinction of salmon populations across the region. Accurate salmon counts during their seasonal migration to their natal river to spawn are essential for fisheries’ regulation and management but are limited by human capacity. Fish population monitoring is a widespread challenge in the United States and worldwide. Beery and her team are working to build a system that will provide a detailed picture of the state of salmon populations in unprecedented, spatial, and temporal resolution by combining sonar sensors and computer vision and machine learning (CVML) techniques. The sonar will capture individual fish as they swim upstream and CVML will train accurate algorithms to interpret the sonar video for detecting, tracking, and counting fish automatically while adapting to changing river conditions and fish densities.Another aquaculture project is being led by Michael Triantafyllou, the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Professor in Ocean Science and Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Robert Vincent, the assistant director at MIT’s Sea Grant Program. They are working with Otto Cordero, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, to control harmful bacteria blooms in aquaculture algae feed production.

      Aquaculture in the United States represents a $1.5 billion industry annually and helps support 1.7 million jobs, yet many American hatcheries are not able to keep up with demand. One barrier to aquaculture production is the high degree of variability in survival rates, most likely caused by a poorly controlled microbiome that leads to bacterial infections and sub-optimal feed efficiency. Triantafyllou, Vincent, and Cordero plan to monitor the microbiome composition of a shellfish hatchery in order to identify possible causing agents of mortality, as well as beneficial microbes. They hope to pair microbe data with detail phenotypic information about the animal population to generate rapid diagnostic tests and explore the potential for microbiome therapies to protect larvae and prevent future outbreaks. The researchers plan to transfer their findings and technology to the local and regional aquaculture community to ensure healthy aquaculture production that will support the expansion of the U.S. aquaculture industry.

      David Des Marais is the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His 2023 J-WAFS project seeks to understand plant growth responses to elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, in the hopes of identifying breeding strategies that maximize crop yield under future CO2 scenarios.Today’s crop plants experience higher atmospheric CO2 than 20 or 30 years ago. Crops such as wheat, oat, barley, and rice typically increase their growth rate and biomass when grown at experimentally elevated atmospheric CO2. This is known as the so-called “CO2 fertilization effect.” However, not all plant species respond to rising atmospheric CO2 with increased growth, and for the ones that do, increased growth doesn’t necessarily correspond to increased crop yield. Using specially built plant growth chambers that can control the concentration of CO2, Des Marais will explore how CO2 availability impacts the development of tillers (branches) in the grass species Brachypodium. He will study how gene expression controls tiller development, and whether this is affected by the growing environment. The tillering response refers to how many branches a plant produces, which sets a limit on how much grain it can yield. Therefore, optimizing the tillering response to elevated CO2 could greatly increase yield. Des Marais will also look at the complete genome sequence of Brachypodium, wheat, oat, and barley to help identify genes relevant for branch growth.Darcy McRose, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is researching whether a combination of plant metabolites and soil bacteria can be used to make mineral-associated phosphorus more bioavailable.The nutrient phosphorus is essential for agricultural plant growth, but when added as a fertilizer, phosphorus sticks to the surface of soil minerals, decreasing bioavailability, limiting plant growth, and accumulating residual phosphorus. Heavily fertilized agricultural soils often harbor large reservoirs of this type of mineral-associated “legacy” phosphorus. Redox transformations are one chemical process that can liberate mineral-associated phosphorus. However, this needs to be carefully controlled, as overly mobile phosphorus can lead to runoff and pollution of natural waters. Ideally, phosphorus would be made bioavailable when plants need it and immobile when they don’t. Many plants make small metabolites called coumarins that might be able to solubilize mineral-adsorbed phosphorus and be activated and inactivated under different conditions. McRose will use laboratory experiments to determine whether a combination of plant metabolites and soil bacteria can be used as a highly efficient and tunable system for phosphorus solubilization. She also aims to develop an imaging platform to investigate exchanges of phosphorus between plants and soil microbes.Many of the 2023 seed grants will support innovative technologies to monitor, quantify, and remediate various kinds of pollutants found in water. Two of the new projects address the problem of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), human-made chemicals that have recently emerged as a global health threat. Known as “forever chemicals,” PFAS are used in many manufacturing processes. These chemicals are known to cause significant health issues including cancer, and they have become pervasive in soil, dust, air, groundwater, and drinking water. Unfortunately, the physical and chemical properties of PFAS render them difficult to detect and remove.Aristide Gumyusenge, the Merton C. Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, is using metal-organic frameworks for low-cost sensing and capture of PFAS. Most metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are synthesized as particles, which complicates their high accuracy sensing performance due to defects such as intergranular boundaries. Thin, film-based electronic devices could enable the use of MOFs for many applications, especially chemical sensing. Gumyusenge’s project aims to design test kits based on two-dimensional conductive MOF films for detecting PFAS in drinking water. In early demonstrations, Gumyusenge and his team showed that these MOF films can sense PFAS at low concentrations. They will continue to iterate using a computation-guided approach to tune sensitivity and selectivity of the kits with the goal of deploying them in real-world scenarios.Carlos Portela, the Brit (1961) and Alex (1949) d’Arbeloff Career Development Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Ariel Furst, the Cook Career Development Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, are building novel architected materials to act as filters for the removal of PFAS from water. Portela and Furst will design and fabricate nanoscale materials that use activated carbon and porous polymers to create a physical adsorption system. They will engineer the materials to have tunable porosities and morphologies that can maximize interactions between contaminated water and functionalized surfaces, while providing a mechanically robust system.Rohit Karnik is a Tata Professor and interim co-department head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is working on another technology, his based on microbead sensors, to rapidly measure and monitor trace contaminants in water.Water pollution from both biological and chemical contaminants contributes to an estimated 1.36 million deaths annually. Chemical contaminants include pesticides and herbicides, heavy metals like lead, and compounds used in manufacturing. These emerging contaminants can be found throughout the environment, including in water supplies. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States sets recommended water quality standards, but states are responsible for developing their own monitoring criteria and systems, which must be approved by the EPA every three years. However, the availability of data on regulated chemicals and on candidate pollutants is limited by current testing methods that are either insensitive or expensive and laboratory-based, requiring trained scientists and technicians. Karnik’s project proposes a simple, self-contained, portable system for monitoring trace and emerging pollutants in water, making it suitable for field studies. The concept is based on multiplexed microbead-based sensors that use thermal or gravitational actuation to generate a signal. His proposed sandwich assay, a testing format that is appealing for environmental sensing, will enable both single-use and continuous monitoring. The hope is that the bead-based assays will increase the ease and reach of detecting and quantifying trace contaminants in water for both personal and industrial scale applications.Alexander Radosevich, a professor in the Department of Chemistry, and Timothy Swager, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry, are teaming up to create rapid, cost-effective, and reliable techniques for on-site arsenic detection in water.Arsenic contamination of groundwater is a problem that affects as many as 500 million people worldwide. Arsenic poisoning can lead to a range of severe health problems from cancer to cardiovascular and neurological impacts. Both the EPA and the World Health Organization have established that 10 parts per billion is a practical threshold for arsenic in drinking water, but measuring arsenic in water at such low levels is challenging, especially in resource-limited environments where access to sensitive laboratory equipment may not be readily accessible. Radosevich and Swager plan to develop reaction-based chemical sensors that bind and extract electrons from aqueous arsenic. In this way, they will exploit the inherent reactivity of aqueous arsenic to selectively detect and quantify it. This work will establish the chemical basis for a new method of detecting trace arsenic in drinking water.Rajeev Ram is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His J-WAFS research will advance a robust technology for monitoring nitrogen-containing pollutants, which threaten over 15,000 bodies of water in the United States alone.Nitrogen in the form of nitrate, nitrite, ammonia, and urea can run off from agricultural fertilizer and lead to harmful algal blooms that jeopardize human health. Unfortunately, monitoring these contaminants in the environment is challenging, as sensors are difficult to maintain and expensive to deploy. Ram and his students will work to establish limits of detection for nitrate, nitrite, ammonia, and urea in environmental, industrial, and agricultural samples using swept-source Raman spectroscopy. Swept-source Raman spectroscopy is a method of detecting the presence of a chemical by using a tunable, single mode laser that illuminates a sample. This method does not require costly, high-power lasers or a spectrometer. Ram will then develop and demonstrate a portable system that is capable of achieving chemical specificity in complex, natural environments. Data generated by such a system should help regulate polluters and guide remediation.Kripa Varanasi, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Angela Belcher, the James Mason Crafts Professor and head of the Department of Biological Engineering, will join forces to develop an affordable water disinfection technology that selectively identifies, adsorbs, and kills “superbugs” in domestic and industrial wastewater.Recent research predicts that antibiotic-resistance bacteria (superbugs) will result in $100 trillion in health care expenses and 10 million deaths annually by 2050. The prevalence of superbugs in our water systems has increased due to corroded pipes, contamination, and climate change. Current drinking water disinfection technologies are designed to kill all types of bacteria before human consumption. However, for certain domestic and industrial applications there is a need to protect the good bacteria required for ecological processes that contribute to soil and plant health. Varanasi and Belcher will combine material, biological, process, and system engineering principles to design a sponge-based water disinfection technology that can identify and destroy harmful bacteria while leaving the good bacteria unharmed. By modifying the sponge surface with specialized nanomaterials, their approach will be able to kill superbugs faster and more efficiently. The sponge filters can be deployed under very low pressure, making them an affordable technology, especially in resource-constrained communities.In addition to the 10 seed grant projects, J-WAFS will also fund a research initiative led by Greg Sixt. Sixt is the research manager for climate and food systems at J-WAFS, and the director of the J-WAFS-led Food and Climate Systems Transformation (FACT) Alliance. His project focuses on the Lake Victoria Basin (LVB) of East Africa. The second-largest freshwater lake in the world, Lake Victoria straddles three countries (Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya) and has a catchment area that encompasses two more (Rwanda and Burundi). Sixt will collaborate with Michael Hauser of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, and Paul Kariuki, of the Lake Victoria Basin Commission.The group will study how to adapt food systems to climate change in the Lake Victoria Basin. The basin is facing a range of climate threats that could significantly impact livelihoods and food systems in the expansive region. For example, extreme weather events like droughts and floods are negatively affecting agricultural production and freshwater resources. Across the LVB, current approaches to land and water management are unsustainable and threaten future food and water security. The Lake Victoria Basin Commission (LVBC), a specialized institution of the East African Community, wants to play a more vital role in coordinating transboundary land and water management to support transitions toward more resilient, sustainable, and equitable food systems. The primary goal of this research will be to support the LVBC’s transboundary land and water management efforts, specifically as they relate to sustainability and climate change adaptation in food systems. The research team will work with key stakeholders in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania to identify specific capacity needs to facilitate land and water management transitions. The two-year project will produce actionable recommendations to the LVBC. More

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      in Energy

      Mike Barrett: Climate goals may take longer, but we’ll get there

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      The Covid-19 pandemic, inflation, and the war in Ukraine have combined to cause unavoidable delays in implementation of Massachusetts’s ambitious goals to tackle climate change, state Senator Mike Barrett said during his April 19 presentation at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) Earth Day Colloquium. But, he added, he remains optimistic that the goals will be reached, with a lag of perhaps two years.

      Barrett, who is senate chair of the state’s Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy, spoke on the topic of “Decarbonizing Massachusetts” at MIT’s Wong Auditorium as part of the Institute’s celebration of Earth Week. The event was accompanied by a poster session highlighting some the work of MIT students and faculty aimed at tackling aspects of the climate issue.

      Martha Broad, MITEI’s executive director, introduced Barrett by pointing out that he was largely responsible for the passage of two major climate-related bills by the Massachusetts legislature: the Roadmap Act in 2021 and the Drive Act in 2022, which together helped to place the state as one of the nation’s leaders in the implementation of measures to ratchet down greenhouse gas emissions.

      The two key pieces of legislation, Barrett said, were complicated bills that included many components, but a major feature of the Roadmap Act was to reduce the time between reassessments of the state’s climate plans from 10 years to five, and to divide the targets for emissions reductions into six separate categories instead of just a single overall number.

      The six sectors the bill delineated are transportation; commercial, industrial, and institutional buildings; residential buildings; industrial processes; natural gas infrastructure; and electricity generation. Each of these faces different challenges, and needs to be evaluated separately, he said.

      The second bill, the Drive Act, set specific targets for implementation of carbon-free electricity generation. “We prioritize offshore wind,” he pointed out, because that’s one resource where Massachusetts has a real edge over other states and regions. Because of especially shallow offshore waters and strong, steady offshore winds that tend to be strongest during the peak demand hours of late afternoon and evening, the state’s coastal waters are an especially promising site for offshore wind farms, he said.

      Whereas the majority of offshore wind installations around the world are in deep water, which precludes fixed foundations and adds significantly to construction costs, Massachusetts’s shallow waters can allow relatively inexpensive construction. “So you can see why offshore wind became a linchpin, not only to our cleaning up the grid, but to feeding it into the building system, and for that matter into transportation, through our electric vehicles,” he said.

      Massachusetts’s needs in addressing climate change are quite different from global averages, or even U.S. averages, he pointed out. Worldwide, agriculture accounts for some 22 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and 11 percent nationally. In Massachusetts the figure is less than one-half of 1 percent. The industrial sector is also much smaller than the national average. Meanwhile, buildings account for only about 6 percent of U.S. emissions, but 13 percent in the state. That means that overall, “buildings, transportation, and power generation become the whole ballgame” for this state, “requiring a real focus in terms of our thinking,” he said.

      Because of that, in those climate bills “we really insisted on reducing emissions in the energy generation sector, and our primary way to get there … lies with wind, and most of that is offshore.” The law calls for emissions from power generation to be cut by 53 percent by 2025, and 70 percent by 2030. Meeting that goal depends heavily on offshore wind. “Clean power is critical because the transmission and transportation and buildings depend on clean power, and offshore wind is critical to that clean power strategy,” he said.

      At the time the bills passed, plans for new offshore wind farm installations showed that the state was well on target to meet these goals, Barrett said. “There was plenty of reason for Massachusetts to feel very optimistic about offshore wind … Everyone was bullish.” While Massachusetts is a small state — 44th out of 50 — because of its unusually favorable offshore conditions, “we are second in the United States in terms of plans to deploy offshore wind,” after New York, he said.

      But then the real world got in the way.

      As Europe and the U.K. quickly tried to pivot away from natural gas and oil in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the picture changed quickly. “Offshore wind suddenly had a lot of competition for the expertise, the equipment, and the materials,” he said.

      As just one example, he said, the ships needed for installation became unavailable. “Suddenly worldwide, there weren’t enough installation vessels to hold these very heavy components that have to be brought out to sea,” he said. About 20 to 40 such vessels are needed to install a single wind farm. “There are a limited number of these vessels capable of carrying these huge pieces of infrastructure in the world. And in the wake of stepped-up demand from Europe, and other places, including China, there was an enormous shortage of appropriate vessels.”

      That wasn’t the only obstacle. Prices of some key commodities also shot up, partly due to supply chain issues associated with the pandemic, and the resulting worldwide inflation. “The ramifications of these kinds of disruptions obviously have been felt worldwide,“ he said. For example, the Hornsea Project off the coast of the United Kingdom is the largest proposed offshore wind farm in the world, and one the U.K. was strongly dependent on to meet climate targets. But the developer of the project, Ørsted, said it could no longer proceed without a major government bailout. At this point, the project remains in limbo.

      In Massachusetts, the company Avangrid had a contract to build 60 offshore wind turbines to deliver 1,200 megawatts of power. But last month, in a highly unusual move for a major company, “they informed Massachusetts that they were terminating a contract they had signed.” That contract was a big part of the state’s overall clean energy strategy, he said. A second developer, that had also signed a contract for a 1,200-MW offshore farm, signaled that it too could not meet its contract.

      “We technically haven’t failed yet” in meeting the goals that were set for emissions reduction, Barrett said. “In theory, we have two years to recover from the setbacks that I’m describing.” Realistically, though, he said “it is quite likely that we’re not going to hit our 2025 and 2030 benchmarks.”

      But despite all this, Barrett ended his remarks on an essentially optimistic note. “I hate to see us fall off-pace in any way,” he said. But, he added, “the truth is that a short delay — and I think we’re looking at just a couple of years delay — is a speed bump, it’s not a roadblock. It is not the end of climate policy.”

      Worldwide demand for offshore wind power remains “extraordinary,” said Barrett, mainly as a result of the need to get off of Russian fossil fuel. As a result, “eventually supply will come into balance with this demand … The balance will be restored.”

      To monitor the process, Barrett said he has submitted legislation to create a new independent Climate Policy Commission, to examine in detail the data on performance in meeting the state’s climate goals and to make recommendations. The measure would provide open access to information for the public, allowing everyone to see the progress being made from an unbiased source.

      “Setbacks are going to happen,” he said. “This is a tough, tough job. While the real world is going to surprise us, persistence is critical.”

      He concluded that “I think we’re going to wind up building every windmill that we need for our emissions reduction policy. Just not on the timeline that we had hoped for.”

      The poster session was co-hosted by the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab and MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative. The full event was sponsored by the MIT Climate Nucleus. More

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      in Energy

      Solve at MIT 2023: Collaboration and climate efforts are at the forefront of social impact

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      “The scale, complexity, the global nature of the problems we’re dealing with are so big that no single institution, industry, or country can deal with them alone,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth stated in her first remarks to the Solve community.

      Over 300 social impact leaders from around the world convened on MIT’s campus for Solve at MIT 2023 to celebrate the 2022 Solver class and to discuss some of the world’s greatest challenges and how we can tackle them with innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology.

      These challenges can be complicated and may even feel insurmountable, but Solve at MIT leaves us with the hope, tools, and connections needed to find solutions together.

      Hala Hanna, executive director of MIT Solve, shared what keeps her inspired and at the front line of social impact: “Optimism isn’t about looking away from the issues but looking right at them, believing we can create the solutions and putting in the work. So, anytime I need a dose of optimism, I look to the innovators we work with,” Hanna shared during the opening plenary, Unlocking our Collective Potential.

      Over the course of three days, more than 300 individuals from around the world convened to celebrate the 2022 Solver class, create partnerships that lead to progress, and address solutions to pressing world issues in real-time.

      Every technologist, philanthropist, investor, and innovator present at Solve at MIT left with their own takeaway, but three main themes seemed to underscore the overall discussions.

      Technology and innovation are as neutral as the makers

      Having bias is a natural part of what makes us human. However, being aware of our predispositions is necessary to transform our lived experiences into actionable solutions for others to benefit from. 

      We’ve largely learned that bias can be both unavoidable and applied almost instantly. Sangbae Kim, director of the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory and professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, proved this through robotics demonstrations where attendees almost unanimously were more impressed with a back-flipping MIT robot compared to one walking in circles. As it turns out, it took one individual three days to program a robot to do a flip and over two weeks for a full team to program one to walk. “We judge through the knowledge and bias we have based on our lived experiences,” Kim pointed out.

      Bias and lived experiences don’t have to be bad things. The solutions we create based on our own lives are what matter. 

      2022 Solver Atif Javed, co-founder and executive director of Tarjimly, began translating for his grandmother as a child and learned about the struggles that come with being a refugee. This led him to develop a humanitarian language-translation application, which connects volunteer translators with immigrants, refugees, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and more, on demand. 

      Vanessa Castañeda Gill, 2022 Solver and co-founder and CEO of Social Cipher, transformed her personal experience with ADHD and autism to develop Ava, a video game empowering neuro-divergent youth and facilitating social-emotional learning.

      For Kelsey Wirth, co-founder and chair of Mothers Out Front, the experience of motherhood and the shared concerns for the well-being of children are what unite her with other moms. 

      Whitney Wolf Herd, founder and CEO of Bumble, shared that as a leader in technology and a person who witnessed toxic online spaces, she sees it as her responsibility to spearhead change. 

      During the plenary, “Bringing us Together or Tearing us Apart?” Wolf Herd asked, “What if we could use technology to be a force for positivity?” She shared her vision for equality and respect to be part of the next digital wave. She also called for technology leaders to join her to ensure “guardrails and ground rules” are in place to make sure this goal becomes a reality.

      Social innovation must be intersectional and intergenerational

      During Solve at MIT, industry leaders across sectors, cultures, ages, and expertise banded together to address pressing issues and to form relationships with innovators looking for support in real time.

      Adam Bly, founder and CEO of System Inc., discussed the interconnected nature of all things and why his organization is on a mission to show the links, “We’re seeing rising complexity in the systems that make up life on earth, and it impacts us individually and globally. The way we organize the information and data we need to make decisions about those systems [is highly] siloed and highly fragmented, and it impairs our ability to make decisions in the most systemic, holistic, rational way.”

      President and CEO of the National Resources Defense Council Manish Bapna shared his advocacy for cross-sector work: “Part of what I’ve seen really proliferate and expand in a good way over the past 10 to 15 years are collaborations involving startups in the private sector, governments, and NGOs. No single stakeholder or organization can solve the problem, but by coming together, they bring different perspectives and skills in ways that can create the innovation we need to see.”

      For a long time, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) were seen as the subjects that would resolve our complex issues, but as it turns out, art also holds a tremendous amount of power to transcend identity, borders, status, and concerns, to connect us all and aid us in global unity. Artists Beatie Wolfe, Norhan Bayomi, Aida Murad, and Nneka Jones showed us how to bring healing and awareness to topics like social and environmental injustice through their music, embroidery, and painting.

      The 2023 Solv[ED] Innovators, all age 24 or under, have solutions that are improving communication for individuals with hearing loss, transforming plastic waste into sustainable furniture, and protecting the Black birthing community, among other incredible feats.

      Kami Dar, co-founder and CEO of Uniti Networks, summarizes the value of interconnected problem-solving: “My favorite SDG [sustainable development goal] is SDG number 17— the power of partnership. Look for the adjacent problem-solvers and make sure we are not reinventing the wheel.”

      Relationships and the environment connect us all

      Solve is working to address global challenges on an ongoing basis connected to climate, economic prosperity, health, and learning. Many of these focus areas bleed into one another, but social justice and climate action served as a backdrop for many global issues addressed during Solve at MIT.

      “When we started addressing climate change, we saw it primarily as technical issues to bring down emissions … There’s inequality, there’s poverty, there are social tensions that are rising … We are not going to address climate change without addressing the social tensions that are embedded,” said Lewis Akenji, managing director of the Hot or Cool Institute. Akenji sees food, mobility, and housing as the most impactful areas to focus solutions on first.

      During the “Ensuring a Just Transition to Net Zero” plenary, Heather Clancy, vice president and editorial director at Greenbiz, asked panelists what lessons they have learned from their work. Janelle Knox Hayes, ​​professor of economic geography and planning at MIT, shared that listening to communities, especially front-line and Indigenous communities, is needed before deploying solutions to the energy crisis. “Climate work has this sense of urgency, like it rapidly has to be done … to do really engaged environmental justice work, we have to slow down and realize even before we begin, we need a long period of time to plan. But before we even do that, we have to rebuild relationships and trust and reciprocity … [This] will lead to better and longer-lasting solutions.”

      Hina Baloch, executive director and global head of climate change and sustainability strategy and communication at General Motors, asked Chéri Smith, founder of Indigenous Energy Initiative, to share her perspective on energy sovereignty as it relates to Indigenous communities. Smith shared, “Tribes can’t be sovereign if they’re relying on outside sources for their energy. We were founded to support the self-determination of tribes to revamp their energy systems and rebuild, construct, and maintain them themselves.”

      Smith shared an example of human and tribal-centered innovation in the making. Through the Biden administration’s national electronic vehicle (EV) initiative, Indigenous Energy Initiative and Native Sun Community Power Development will collaborate and create an inter-tribal EV charging network. “The last time we built out an electric grid, it deliberately skipped over tribal country. This time, we want to make sure that we not only have a seat at the table, but that we build out the tables and invite everyone to them,” said Smith.

      Solve at MIT led to meaningful discussions about climate change, intersectional and accessible innovation, and the power that human connection has to unite everyone. Entrepreneurship and social change are the paths forward. And although the challenges ahead of us can be daunting, with community, collaboration, and a healthy dose of bravery, global challenges will continue to be solved by agile impact entrepreneurs all around the world. 

      As Adrianne Haslet, a professional ballroom dancer and Boston Marathon bombing survivor, reminded attendees, “What will get you to the finish line is nothing compared to what got you to the start line.” More

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      in Energy

      Finding “hot spots” where compounding environmental and economic risks converge

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      A computational tool developed by researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change pinpoints specific counties within the United States that are particularly vulnerable to economic distress resulting from a transition from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy sources. By combining county-level data on employment in fossil fuel (oil, natural gas, and coal) industries with data on populations below the poverty level, the tool identifies locations with high risks for transition-driven economic hardship. It turns out that many of these high-risk counties are in the south-central U.S., with a heavy concentration in the lower portions of the Mississippi River.

      The computational tool, which the researchers call the System for the Triage of Risks from Environmental and Socio-economic Stressors (STRESS) platform, almost instantly displays these risk combinations on an easy-to-read visual map, revealing those counties that stand to gain the most from targeted green jobs retraining programs.  

      Drawing on data that characterize land, water, and energy systems; biodiversity; demographics; environmental equity; and transportation networks, the STRESS platform enables users to assess multiple, co-evolving, compounding hazards within a U.S. geographical region from the national to the county level. Because of its comprehensiveness and precision, this screening-level visualization tool can pinpoint risk “hot spots” that can be subsequently investigated in greater detail. Decision-makers can then plan targeted interventions to boost resilience to location-specific physical and economic risks.

      The platform and its applications are highlighted in a new study in the journal Frontiers in Climate.

      “As risks to natural and managed resources — and to the economies that depend upon them — become more complex, interdependent, and compounding amid rapid environmental and societal changes, they require more and more human and computational resources to understand and act upon,” says MIT Joint Program Deputy Director C. Adam Schlosser, the lead author of the study. “The STRESS platform provides decision-makers with an efficient way to combine and analyze data on those risks that matter most to them, identify ‘hot spots’ of compounding risk, and design interventions to minimize that risk.”

      In one demonstration of the STRESS platform’s capabilities, the study shows that national and global actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could simultaneously reduce risks to land, water, and air quality in the upper Mississippi River basin while increasing economic risks in the lower basin, where poverty and unemployment are already disproportionate. In another demonstration, the platform finds concerning “hot spots” where flood risk, poverty, and nonwhite populations coincide.

      The risk triage platform is based on an emerging discipline called multi-sector dynamics (MSD), which seeks to understand and model compounding risks and potential tipping points across interconnected natural and human systems. Tipping points occur when these systems can no longer sustain multiple, co-evolving stresses, such as extreme events, population growth, land degradation, drinkable water shortages, air pollution, aging infrastructure, and increased human demands. MSD researchers use observations and computer models to identify key precursory indicators of such tipping points, providing decision-makers with critical information that can be applied to mitigate risks and boost resilience in natural and managed resources. With funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, the MIT Joint Program has since 2018 been developing MSD expertise and modeling tools and using them to explore compounding risks and potential tipping points in selected regions of the United States.

      Current STRESS platform data includes more than 100 risk metrics at the county-level scale, but data collection is ongoing. MIT Joint Program researchers are continuing to develop the STRESS platform as an “open-science tool” that welcomes input from academics, researchers, industry and the general public. More

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      in Environment

      Four researchers with MIT ties earn 2023 Schmidt Science Fellowships

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      Four researchers with ties to MIT have been named Schmidt Science Fellows this year. Lillian Chin ’17, SM ’19; Neil Dalvie PD ’22, PhD ’22; Suong Nguyen, and Yirui Zhang SM ’19, PhD ’23 are among the 32 exceptional early-career scientists worldwide chosen to receive the prestigious fellowships.

      “History provides powerful examples of what happens when scientists are given the freedom to ask big questions which can achieve real breakthroughs across disciplines,” says Wendy Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Futures and president of the Schmidt Family Foundation. “Schmidt Science Fellows are tackling climate destruction, discovering new drugs against disease, developing novel materials, using machine learning to understand the drivers of human health, and much more. This new cohort will add to this legacy in applying scientific discovery to improve human health and opportunity, and preserve and restore essential planetary systems.”

      Schmidt Futures is a philanthropic initiative that brings talented people together in networks to prove out their ideas and solve hard problems in science and society. Schmidt Science Fellows receive a stipend of $100,000 a year for up to two years of postdoctoral research in a discipline different from their PhD at a world-leading lab anywhere across the globe.

      Lillian Chin ’17, SM ’19 is currently pursuing her PhD in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Her research focuses on creating new materials for robots. By designing the geometry of a material, Chin creates new “meta-materials” that have different properties from the original. Using this technique, she has created robot balls that dramatically expand in volume and soft grippers that can work in dangerous environments. All of these robots are built out of a single material, letting the researchers 3D print them with extra internal features like channels. These channels help to measure the deformation of metamaterials, enabling Chin and her collaborators to create robots that are strong, can move, and sense their own shape, like muscles do.

      “I feel very honored to have been chosen for this fellowship,” says Chin. “I feel like I proposed a very risky pivot, since my background is only in engineering, with very limited exposure to neuroscience. I’m very excited to be given the opportunity to learn best practices for interacting with patients and be able to translate my knowledge from robotics to biology.”

      With the Schmidt Fellowship, Chin plans to pursue new frontiers for custom materials with internal sensors, which can measure force and deformation and can be placed anywhere within the material. “I want to use these materials to make tools for clinicians and neuroscientists to better understand how humans touch and grasp objects around them,” says Chin. “I’m especially interested in seeing how my materials could help in diagnosis motor-related diseases or improve rehab outcomes by providing the patient with feedback. This will help me create robots that have a better sense of touch and learn how to move objects around like humans do.”

      Neil Dalvie PD ’22, PhD ’22 is a graduate of the Department of Chemical Engineering, where he worked with Professor J. Christopher Love on manufacturing of therapeutic proteins. Dalvie developed molecular biology techniques for manufacturing high-quality proteins in yeast, which enables rapid testing of new products and low-cost manufacturing and large scales. During the pandemic, he led a team that applied these learnings to develop a Covid-19 vaccine that was deployed in multiple low-income countries. After graduating, Dalvie wanted to apply the precision biological engineering that is routinely deployed in medicinal manufacturing to other large-scale bioprocesses.

      “It’s rare for scientists to cross large technical gaps after so many years of specific training to get a PhD — you get comfy being an expert in your field,” says Dalvie. “I was definitely intimidated by the giant leap from vaccine manufacturing to the natural rock cycle. The fellowship has allowed me to dive into the new field by removing immediate pressure to publish or find my next job. I am excited for what commonalities we will find between biomanufacturing and biogeochemistry.”

      As a Schmidt Science Fellow, Dalvie will work with Professor Pamela Silver at Harvard Medical School on engineering microorganisms for enhanced rock weathering and carbon sequestration to combat climate change. They are applying modern molecular biology to enhance natural biogeochemical processes at gigaton scales.

      Suong (Su) Nguyen, a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Jeremiah Johnson’s lab in the Department of Chemistry, earned her PhD from Princeton University, where she developed light-driven, catalytic methodologies for organic synthesis, biomass valorization, plastic waste recycling, and functionalization of quantum sensing materials.

      As a Schmidt Science fellow, Nguyen will pivot from organic chemistry to nanomaterials. Biological systems are able to synthesize macromolecules with precise structure essential for their biological function. Scientists have long dreamed of achieving similar control over synthetic materials, but existing methods are inefficient and limited in scope. Nguyen hopes to develop new strategies to achieve such high level of control over the structure and properties of nanomaterials and explore their potential for use in therapeutic applications.

      “I feel extremely honored and grateful to receive the Schmidt Science Fellowship,” says Nguyen. “The fellowship will provide me with a unique opportunity to engage with scientists from a very wide range of research backgrounds. I believe this will significantly shape the research objectives for my future career.”

      Yirui Zhang SM ’19, PhD ’22 is a graduate of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Zhang’s research focuses on electrochemical energy storage and conversion, including lithium-ion batteries and electrocatalysis. She has developed in situ spectroscopy and electrochemical methods to probe the electrode-electrolyte interface, understand the interfacial molecular structures, and unravel the fundamental thermodynamics and kinetics of (electro)chemical reactions in energy storage. Further, she has leveraged the physical chemistry of liquids and tuned the molecular structures at the interface to improve the stability and kinetics of electrochemical reactions. 

      “I am honored and thrilled to have been named a Schmidt Science Fellow,” says Zhang. “The fellowship will not only provide me with the unique opportunity to broaden my scientific perspectives and pursue pivoting research, but also create a lifelong network for us to collaborate across diverse fields and become scientific and societal thought leaders. I look forward to pushing the boundaries of my research and advancing technologies to tackle global challenges in energy storage and health care with interdisciplinary efforts!”

      As a Schmidt Science Fellow, Zhang will work across disciplines and pivot to biosensing. She plans to combine spectroscopy, electrokinetics, and machine learning to develop a fast and cost-effective technique for monitoring and understanding infectious disease. The innovations will benefit next-generation point-of-care medical devices and wastewater-based epidemiology to provide timely diagnosis and help protect humans against deadly infections and antimicrobial resistance. More

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      in Environment

      Inaugural J-WAFS Grand Challenge aims to develop enhanced crop variants and move them from lab to land

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      According to MIT’s charter, established in 1861, part of the Institute’s mission is to advance the “development and practical application of science in connection with arts, agriculture, manufactures, and commerce.” Today, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) is one of the driving forces behind water and food-related research on campus, much of which relates to agriculture. In 2022, J-WAFS established the Water and Food Grand Challenge Grant to inspire MIT researchers to work toward a water-secure and food-secure future for our changing planet. Not unlike MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges, the J-WAFS Grand Challenge seeks to leverage multiple areas of expertise, programs, and Institute resources. The initial call for statements of interests returned 23 letters from MIT researchers spanning 18 departments, labs, and centers. J-WAFS hosted workshops for the proposers to present and discuss their initial ideas. These were winnowed down to a smaller set of invited concept papers, followed by the final proposal stage. 

      Today, J-WAFS is delighted to report that the inaugural J-WAFS Grand Challenge Grant has been awarded to a team of researchers led by Professor Matt Shoulders and research scientist Robert Wilson of the Department of Chemistry. A panel of expert, external reviewers highly endorsed their proposal, which tackles a longstanding problem in crop biology — how to make photosynthesis more efficient. The team will receive $1.5 million over three years to facilitate a multistage research project that combines cutting-edge innovations in synthetic and computational biology. If successful, this project could create major benefits for agriculture and food systems worldwide.

      “Food systems are a major source of global greenhouse gas emissions, and they are also increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. That’s why when we talk about climate change, we have to talk about food systems, and vice versa,” says Maria T. Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research. “J-WAFS is central to MIT’s efforts to address the interlocking challenges of climate, water, and food. This new grant program aims to catalyze innovative projects that will have real and meaningful impacts on water and food. I congratulate Professor Shoulders and the rest of the research team on being the inaugural recipients of this grant.”

      Shoulders will work with Bryan Bryson, associate professor of biological engineering, as well as Bin Zhang, associate professor of chemistry, and Mary Gehring, a professor in the Department of Biology and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Robert Wilson from the Shoulders lab will be coordinating the research effort. The team at MIT will work with outside collaborators Spencer Whitney, a professor from the Australian National University, and Ahmed Badran, an assistant professor at the Scripps Research Institute. A milestone-based collaboration will also take place with Stephen Long, a professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The group consists of experts in continuous directed evolution, machine learning, molecular dynamics simulations, translational plant biochemistry, and field trials.

      “This project seeks to fundamentally improve the RuBisCO enzyme that plants use to convert carbon dioxide into the energy-rich molecules that constitute our food,” says J-WAFS Director John H. Lienhard V. “This difficult problem is a true grand challenge, calling for extensive resources. With J-WAFS’ support, this long-sought goal may finally be achieved through MIT’s leading-edge research,” he adds.

      RuBisCO: No, it’s not a new breakfast cereal; it just might be the key to an agricultural revolution

      A growing global population, the effects of climate change, and social and political conflicts like the war in Ukraine are all threatening food supplies, particularly grain crops. Current projections estimate that crop production must increase by at least 50 percent over the next 30 years to meet food demands. One key barrier to increased crop yields is a photosynthetic enzyme called Ribulose-1,5-Bisphosphate Carboxylase/Oxygenase (RuBisCO). During photosynthesis, crops use energy gathered from light to draw carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and transform it into sugars and cellulose for growth, a process known as carbon fixation. RuBisCO is essential for capturing the CO2 from the air to initiate conversion of CO2 into energy-rich molecules like glucose. This reaction occurs during the second stage of photosynthesis, also known as the Calvin cycle. Without RuBisCO, the chemical reactions that account for virtually all carbon acquisition in life could not occur.

      Unfortunately, RuBisCO has biochemical shortcomings. Notably, the enzyme acts slowly. Many other enzymes can process a thousand molecules per second, but RuBisCO in chloroplasts fixes less than six carbon dioxide molecules per second, often limiting the rate of plant photosynthesis. Another problem is that oxygen (O2) molecules and carbon dioxide molecules are relatively similar in shape and chemical properties, and RuBisCO is unable to fully discriminate between the two. The inadvertent fixation of oxygen by RuBisCO leads to energy and carbon loss. What’s more, at higher temperatures RuBisCO reacts even more frequently with oxygen, which will contribute to decreased photosynthetic efficiency in many staple crops as our climate warms.

      The scientific consensus is that genetic engineering and synthetic biology approaches could revolutionize photosynthesis and offer protection against crop losses. To date, crop RuBisCO engineering has been impaired by technological obstacles that have limited any success in significantly enhancing crop production. Excitingly, genetic engineering and synthetic biology tools are now at a point where they can be applied and tested with the aim of creating crops with new or improved biological pathways for producing more food for the growing population.

      An epic plan for fighting food insecurity

      The 2023 J-WAFS Grand Challenge project will use state-of-the-art, transformative protein engineering techniques drawn from biomedicine to improve the biochemistry of photosynthesis, specifically focusing on RuBisCO. Shoulders and his team are planning to build what they call the Enhanced Photosynthesis in Crops (EPiC) platform. The project will evolve and design better crop RuBisCO in the laboratory, followed by validation of the improved enzymes in plants, ultimately resulting in the deployment of enhanced RuBisCO in field trials to evaluate the impact on crop yield. 

      Several recent developments make high-throughput engineering of crop RuBisCO possible. RuBisCO requires a complex chaperone network for proper assembly and function in plants. Chaperones are like helpers that guide proteins during their maturation process, shielding them from aggregation while coordinating their correct assembly. Wilson and his collaborators previously unlocked the ability to recombinantly produce plant RuBisCO outside of plant chloroplasts by reconstructing this chaperone network in Escherichia coli (E. coli). Whitney has now established that the RuBisCO enzymes from a range of agriculturally relevant crops, including potato, carrot, strawberry, and tobacco, can also be expressed using this technology. Whitney and Wilson have further developed a range of RuBisCO-dependent E. coli screens that can identify improved RuBisCO from complex gene libraries. Moreover, Shoulders and his lab have developed sophisticated in vivo mutagenesis technologies that enable efficient continuous directed evolution campaigns. Continuous directed evolution refers to a protein engineering process that can accelerate the steps of natural evolution simultaneously in an uninterrupted cycle in the lab, allowing for rapid testing of protein sequences. While Shoulders and Badran both have prior experience with cutting-edge directed evolution platforms, this will be the first time directed evolution is applied to RuBisCO from plants.

      Artificial intelligence is changing the way enzyme engineering is undertaken by researchers. Principal investigators Zhang and Bryson will leverage modern computational methods to simulate the dynamics of RuBisCO structure and explore its evolutionary landscape. Specifically, Zhang will use molecular dynamics simulations to simulate and monitor the conformational dynamics of the atoms in a protein and its programmed environment over time. This approach will help the team evaluate the effect of mutations and new chemical functionalities on the properties of RuBisCO. Bryson will employ artificial intelligence and machine learning to search the RuBisCO activity landscape for optimal sequences. The computational and biological arms of the EPiC platform will work together to both validate and inform each other’s approaches to accelerate the overall engineering effort.

      Shoulders and the group will deploy their designed enzymes in tobacco plants to evaluate their effects on growth and yield relative to natural RuBisCO. Gehring, a plant biologist, will assist with screening improved RuBisCO variants using the tobacco variety Nicotiana benthamianaI, where transient expression can be deployed. Transient expression is a speedy approach to test whether novel engineered RuBisCO variants can be correctly synthesized in leaf chloroplasts. Variants that pass this quality-control checkpoint at MIT will be passed to the Whitney Lab at the Australian National University for stable transformation into Nicotiana tabacum (tobacco), enabling robust measurements of photosynthetic improvement. In a final step, Professor Long at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will perform field trials of the most promising variants.

      Even small improvements could have a big impact

      A common criticism of efforts to improve RuBisCO is that natural evolution has not already identified a better enzyme, possibly implying that none will be found. Traditional views have speculated a catalytic trade-off between RuBisCO’s specificity factor for CO2 / O2 versus its CO2 fixation efficiency, leading to the belief that specificity factor improvements might be offset by even slower carbon fixation or vice versa. This trade-off has been suggested to explain why natural evolution has been slow to achieve a better RuBisCO. But Shoulders and the team are convinced that the EPiC platform can unlock significant overall improvements to plant RuBisCO. This view is supported by the fact that Wilson and Whitney have previously used directed evolution to improve CO2 fixation efficiency by 50 percent in RuBisCO from cyanobacteria (the ancient progenitors of plant chloroplasts) while simultaneously increasing the specificity factor. 

      The EPiC researchers anticipate that their initial variants could yield 20 percent increases in RuBisCO’s specificity factor without impairing other aspects of catalysis. More sophisticated variants could lift RuBisCO out of its evolutionary trap and display attributes not currently observed in nature. “If we achieve anywhere close to such an improvement and it translates to crops, the results could help transform agriculture,” Shoulders says. “If our accomplishments are more modest, it will still recruit massive new investments to this essential field.”

      Successful engineering of RuBisCO would be a scientific feat of its own and ignite renewed enthusiasm for improving plant CO2 fixation. Combined with other advances in photosynthetic engineering, such as improved light usage, a new green revolution in agriculture could be achieved. Long-term impacts of the technology’s success will be measured in improvements to crop yield and grain availability, as well as resilience against yield losses under higher field temperatures. Moreover, improved land productivity together with policy initiatives would assist in reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture. With more “crop per drop,” reductions in water consumption from agriculture would be a major boost to sustainable farming practices.

      “Our collaborative team of biochemists and synthetic biologists, computational biologists, and chemists is deeply integrated with plant biologists and field trial experts, yielding a robust feedback loop for enzyme engineering,” Shoulders adds. “Together, this team will be able to make a concerted effort using the most modern, state-of-the-art techniques to engineer crop RuBisCO with an eye to helping make meaningful gains in securing a stable crop supply, hopefully with accompanying improvements in both food and water security.” More