For the First Time, Genetically Modified Trees Have Been Planted in a U.S. Forest: NY Times

This article was a total blast from the past for me.. I organized a joint meeting with SAF, ESA, and Pew Agbiotech on forest tree biotech lo these twenty years ago.

Most forest products companies have not been interested in carrying these kinds of investments (for one thing conifers are harder to grow from culture) with unknown risks over sawtimber rotations.

Nevertheless,  it could be that carbon markets upend these traditional economies.  Conceivably every year these trees soak up more carbon than your average poplar (or whatever the carbon is measured against), it could be making some money.  Even if they ultimately die.. early, or get sick, or eaten by bugs, or various other predators, and start producing less than the average pop.  (that’s why I can’t really get my head around many tree carbon market programs). Or maybe not? Note the caption to the photo says “the company has started marketing credits” based on things that haven’t happened yet and could be reversed.

But the landowner in this story is planting a mix of species, so his risk is minimal..his idea is simply to get the hybrid poplars to the same size faster. If that doesn’t work, the other trees  will just soak up the carbon.  Also, mixing species are handy from the unknown future angle, as forest economists have long understood vis a vis markets and pests,  but is also true for unknown climate change.

They’re also being planted alongside native trees like sweet gum, tulip trees and bald cypress, to avoid genetically identical stands of trees known as monocultures; non-engineered poplars are being planted as experimental controls. Ms. Hall and Mr. Mellor describe their plantings as both pilot projects and research trials. Company scientists will monitor tree growth and survival.

Understatement of the week for reforestation practitioners:

“They have some encouraging results,” said Donald Ort, a University of Illinois geneticist whose plant experiments helped inspire Living Carbon’s technology. But he added that the notion that greenhouse results will translate to success in the real world is “not a slam dunk.”

This one gave me a chuckle.  I seem to recall a research proposal mentioned low lignin loblolly pine for easier (and less chemical-using) pulping.  The old “floppy tree” proposal.

The problem with these approaches has been that researchers want to do something (like get $ for sequencing, or make money in carbon markets).  So they dream up ideas and hype them. So environmental groups listen, and think that the hype will really happen (plantations of floppy trees or GE hybrid poplars everywhere!)  and get worried, hyping the hype. Meanwhile, the rest of us just yawn and carry on.

That same year, Ms. Hall, who had been working for Silicon Valley ventures like OpenAI (which was responsible for the language model ChatGPT), met her future co-founder Patrick Mellor at a climate tech conference. Mr. Mellor was researching whether trees could be engineered to produce decay-resistant wood.

From floppy trees to decay-resistant wood in only 30 years!

In a field accustomed to glacial progress and heavy regulation, Living Carbon has moved fast and freely. The gene gun-modified poplars avoided a set of federal regulations of genetically modified organisms that can stall biotech projects for years. (Those regulations have since been revised.) By contrast, a team of scientists who genetically engineered a blight-resistant chestnut tree using the same bacterium method employed earlier by Living Carbon have been awaiting a decision since 2020..

“You could say the old rule was sort of leaky,” said Bill Doley, a consultant who helped manage the Agriculture Department’s genetically modified organism regulation process until 2022.

Why would gene-gunning (without Agrobacterium genes involved) be OK? Well, the source of APHIS’s regulatory authority was that Agrobacterium is a plant pest, and thereby subject to the Plant Protection Act.  No Agro, no authority.  Gene gunning = no authority.  As in this sorghum letter I found online:

Because domesticated sorghum is not a plant pest or listed as a federal noxious weed, the genetic elements used to generate TRSBG101B Transgenic Sorghum are all sourced from fully classified organisms, and the transformation process does not introduce any plant pest DNA components, there is no scientifically valid basis for concluding that TRSBGlOlB Transgenic Sorghum is, or will become, a plant pest within the meaning of the Plant Protection Act (PPA).
Ceres therefore asserts that under current regulations, TRSBG101B Transgenic Sorghum is not a regulated article within the meaning of 7 CFR §340.1 because it does not satisfy any of the regulatory criteria that would subject it to the oversight of the USDA’s Animal Plant Health and Inspection Service (APHIS).

There are so many different ways of working with DNAs and RNAs today that the regulatory system must be almost unimaginably complex.  It must be difficult to keep up with the technologies.

And from fellow forest geneticists:

Forest geneticists were less sanguine about Living Carbon’s trees. Researchers typically assess trees in confined field trials before moving to large-scale plantings, said Andrew Newhouse, who directs the engineered chestnut project at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. “Their claims seem bold based on very limited real-world data,” he said.

Steve Strauss, a geneticist at Oregon State University, agreed with the need to see field data. “My experience over the years is that the greenhouse means almost nothing” about the outdoor prospects of trees whose physiology has been modified, he said. “Venture capitalists may not know that.”

Dr. Ort of the University of Illinois dismissed such environmental concerns. But he said investors were taking a big chance on a tree that might not meet its creators’ expectations.

“It’s not unexciting,” he said. “I just think it’s uber high risk.”

APHIS Public Comment Period Open for Deregulating Transgenic American Chestnut

A birds-eye view of the American chestnut forest restoration site. (from Cornell Alliance For Science site).

 

And now for something completely different…

For the last 30 or so years, the Chestnut People (people who want to restore American Chestnut) have been engaged in such a horse race. There were backcrosses to Chinese chestnut, which is resistant to Chestnut Blight.  There were folks trying to breed apparently resistant American Chestnuts to each other.  Finally, there were folks trying genetic engineering. At some point, they all got together to form what The American Chestnut Foundation calls 3BUR  :Breeding, Biotechnology and Biocontrol United for Restoration.

So here we are.. there is a specific tree called Darling 58  which is in a public comment period to be deregulated by APHIS, so that it can be planted like any other tree.  The idea is then to cross the GE trees with local chestnuts to develop regionally adapted and diverse populations.  Meanwhile another horse has entered the field called CRISPR , who might ultimately beat them all. If the last 30 years have taught us anything, it is that intervention is required to restore the Chestnut and the transgenic horse is the only one likely to finish (not just win) the race.

There’s a lengthy and interesting NY Times Magazine article by Gabriel Potkin on the history and development here:.  I thought it might be interesting to look at the arguments against deregulation.

But Brenda Jo McManama, an organizer with a group called the Indigenous Environmental Network, points to a 2010 agreement in which Monsanto licensed two gene-modifying patents to the New York chapter of the chestnut foundation and its collaborating institutions. (Powell says that industry contributions, including from Monsanto, have amounted to less than 4 percent of his work’s total funding.) McManama suspects Monsanto (acquired by Bayer in 2018) surreptitiously seeks to patent future iterations of the tree by supporting what appears to be an altruistic project. “Monsanto is evil,” she says flatly.

Powell says the patents in the 2010 agreement have since expired, and by publishing the details of his tree in the scientific literature, he has ensured it can’t be patented. But he realizes that will not allay all concerns. “I know some people are going to say, You’re just a Monsanto shill,” he says. “What can you do? You can’t help that.”

About five years ago, leaders at the American Chestnut Foundation concluded that they couldn’t achieve their goals through crossbreeding alone and embraced Powell’s genetic-engineering program. That decision has caused some rifts. In March 2019, Lois Breault-Melican, the president of the Massachusetts-Rhode Island chapter of the foundation, resigned, citing arguments made by the Global Justice Ecology Project, an anti-genetic-engineering organization based in Buffalo; her husband, Denis Melican, also left the board. The couple is particularly concerned that Powell’s chestnut could prove to be a “Trojan horse” that clears the way for other commercially grown trees supercharged by genetic engineering, Denis told me.

Susan Offutt, an agricultural economist who served as chair of a National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine committee that produced a 2018 study of biotechnology in forests, noted that the government’s regulatory process focuses on narrow questions of biological risk and almost never accounts for broader societal concerns like those raised by anti-G.M.O. activists. “What about the intrinsic value of the forest?” she asks, as an example of a question the process does not address. “Do forests have their own merit? Do we have a moral obligation to take that into account when we make decisions about intervening?”

Most scientists I spoke with see little reason to fear Powell’s tree, given the profound disruptions forests have already endured: logging, mining, development and a relentless influx of tree-destroying insects and diseases, among which chestnut blight has proved to be a kind of opening act. “We’re introducing new whole organisms all the time,” says Gary Lovett, a forest ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. The transgenic chestnut “would have less of an impact than that.”

Donald Waller, a forest ecologist recently retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, goes further. “I sketched out a little balance with risks on one side and rewards on the other, and I just kept scratching my head over the risks” that this transgenic tree could pose to the forest, he told me. By contrast, “the side of the page under the rewards is just spilling over with ink.” A blight-resistant chestnut would finally notch a victory for the embattled forest, he says. “People need hope. People need symbols.”

So there are two forest ecologists who are OK with it.

An ag economist who was the Chair of an NAS panel (on Forest Health and Biotechnology? Well, OK)  raises questions about the APHIS regulatory system which fall into the realm of  moral philosophy.

Folks who think the  (possibly bad) “commercial forest industry” is using this as a Trojan Horse.  For the last twenty years, I’ve been saying transgenic  trees just aren’t practical for forest industry and perhaps I’m right -as none have shown up.

and “Monsanto is evil”? It’s hard to think of TACF-chestnut restoration enthusiasts- or professors at SUNY ESF for that matter, as evil.

It’s really hard for me to see any bad guys here.  If you don’t want them, fine. But there seems to be some needless enemizing going on.

I’m with the forest ecologists here, and will be submitting my comments. Here’s a link to further information on how to comment via TACF.

 

Synthetic biologists and conservationists open talks- Nature News

I ran across this while doing some other work…
Here’s the link and below is an excerpt.

Sounds like a bonanza of “EIS’s we’d rather not review”! I remember some folks wanted to genetically engineer wood fungi so they would break down logs faster in the woods and reduce fuel loads quicker..I wonder if that ever got funded..

Soil saver

As an example of what the field can offer conservation, Kitney cites an undergraduate project he supervised that was presented at the 2011 International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, a kind of synthetic-biology science fair. Christopher Schoene, now at the University of Oxford, UK, and his team engineered Escherichia coli so that the bacterium would migrate into plant roots and produce the growth hormone auxin. In greenhouse tests, roots of cress plants that contained the engineered bacterium grew longer than those without, and the soil retained more water. Such a bacterium might help to combat desertification — the degradation of fertile land into desert when soil nutrients are lost.

But synthetic biology worries some observers, who fear what might happen if genes or organisms escape from their intended niches. Paul Falkowski, a geomicrobiologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, sees value in microbes that can turn carbon dioxide into fuel or make fertilizers from atmospheric nitrogen, but he worries that industrial-scale production could have drastic consequences, such as the inadvertent production of greenhouse gases.“I am rather amazed at the naivety of synthetic biologists at the way the world works,”he says.

Many attendees also expressed nervousness about the potential of synthetic biology to influence land-use patterns. Microbes that reduce greenhouse-gas levels might lessen the pressure on governments to maintain rainforests, they said. Technologies that make marginal lands more productive could turn undeveloped land into single-crop farms.

Such shifts are already beginning to occur. A project begun by Jay Keasling, a synthetic biologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, coaxed yeast to produce the antimalarial drug artemesinin at industrial levels (see Nature 494, 160–161; 2013). Much of the drug currently comes from cultivation of sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua), but Keasling believes that synthetic sources will eventually force A. annua growers in China and elsewhere to cultivate other crops. “I don’t make the decision about what gets produced,” says Keasling, whose company, Amyris in Emeryville, California, aims to produce industrial products with engineered microbes. “The marketplace decides. What I do is provide more options.”

Concerns could be mitigated by designing ways to limit the spread of synthetic microbes. Schoene’s team, for example, added a genetic safeguard to its E. coli that stops other microbes from acquiring the auxin-producing gene. “If [safeguards] are being developed with as much creativity as other technologies, that would reassure me a lot,” says Stephen Palumbi, a marine biologist at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California.

Bill Sutherland, a conservation biologist at the University of Cambridge, agrees that his colleagues need to take synthetic biology seriously. But he says that a small poll he took at the meeting shows that the gulf between the two disciplines is not so wide. Both agree that more-efficient use of natural resources could be an important boon from synthetic biology. Both worry about the potential for synthetic organisms to harm natural ecosystems.

GE Eucalyptus Petition by APHIS on Regulations.gov

ArborGen_Transgenic_Hybrid_Eucalyptus_by_GIT_Forestry

Some readers have written asking for more east coast stories.. I ran into this while looking for comments on the Planning Rule Directives. This is a petition for non-regulated status for GE freeze-tolerant eucalyptus lines. This morning there were 475 comments received (and 0 for the Planning Directives).

You can read the docket as well as the public comments:
Here’s one I excerpted:

The US Forest Service opposes GE eucalyptus plantations due to their impact on ground water and streams. Many regions of the country have been plagued by droughts in recent years. Developing plantations of an invasive, water-greedy and fire-prone tree is foolhardy and dangerous.

The forests of the Southeast, which would be most impacted by GE trees, are some of the most biodiverse in the world.
They contain species found nowhere else. Species like the Louisiana Black Bear, the golden-cheeked warbler and the red-cockaded woodpecker are already endangered. Eucalyptus plantations could push these and other species over the edge. For these reasons, the Georgia Department of Wildlife opposes GE eucalyptus trees due to these impacts.
Please give this serious thought and do not approve GE trees!

Does anyone know where the FS position or letter is available?

What struck me about these comments is that they are mostly arguments against eucalyptus plantations, not genetically engineered eucs per se.. although conceivably if the engineering worked as advertised, you could plant them more places. It’s interesting that folks can convert to ag crops (perhaps hemp?) or loblolly plantation, or subdivisions, but eucalyptus?

Now if you go to a this site, they say:

Tree biotechnology company ArborGen is requesting an unprecedented USDA approval: “freeze tolerant” GMO Eucalyptus Trees to be grown in seven southeastern states, and possibly the Pacific Northwest. If approved, this will be the first GE forest tree to be commercially grown in the U.S. Paper and biofuel companies are planning on growing these trees on intensively managed monoculture tree plantations.

The problem with economically-motivated proposals like this is that they have no consideration or understanding of the natural systems at work in the world. If we upset nature’s balance, there will be consequences that were not taken into account in the short-term rush for profit.

Eucalyptus trees are not native to North America, are harmful to native wildlife, and they’ve already become invasive in California. Industry plans to plant millions of these GE eucalyptus in ecosystems and climates that have never supported eucalyptus in the past. Fragile ecosystems and a host of endangered plant and animal species could be threatened by such large scale GE eucalyptus plantations.

A couple of thoughts.. if you go here, you see the folks who have been working on plain old tree breeding for eucs (the hardy Eucalyptus discussion board). Note that planting non-GE eucs, like other tree species, is not regulated.

I wonder if “paper companies” are actually planning to do this. IP just announced that they are working with Dogwood Alliance.. it makes me wonder. TIMO’s and REITs seem to be fairly conservative, and no one wants to plant trees that wait a while and then die in some future winter. Maybe folks are getting concerned based on ArborGen’s marketing, rather than real world plans. Just wondering..