'' VOIGT LAB '' VOLTS : BRAINPOWER

 

Voigt Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looks like any other laboratory : petri dishes, incubators and hundreds of small bottles. But a radical effort to engineer nature to fight climate change is underway there.

The work has its origins about two decades ago, when '' Christopher Voigt '' a biologist and engineer, took apart a Texas Instruments calculator.

He deconstructed its computer chip and figured out a way to enter the computer code into a  DNA sequencing program.

Instead of designing a new chip, he merged with a DNA sequence that could be edited into  bacteria cells and program them to line up in petri dish in a predetermined sequence of colors, lighting up like a calculator's display.

Dr. Voigt became a rock star of sorts in the fast-growing field of biological engineering - changing biological processes to create living systems that function in ways that do not already exist in nature.

Fertilizer was a natural target for this transformative technology.

As far back as 1975, scientists had been trying to revamp the way crops are grown to produce more food with less chemical fertilizer.

Nature, on its own, already does some of this work. Microbes in soil feed off sugars expelled by corn roots and then nitrogen in the air into food for the corn crop. But once factory-made fertilizers is spread on a field the microbes detect its presence and turn off.

Pivot's product, with a series of tweaks to its DNA, effectively hijack the microbe and forces it to keep producing nitrogen, and at a much faster rate.

Still, it's not enough.

Pivot's altered bacteria can replace about 20 percent of the fertilizer needed on a cornfield ; the goal is to supplant as much as half the fertilizer used today.

Other companies, including Ginkgo Bioworks and BioConsortia, are developing their own versions.

Academics at M.I.T. and other universities are trying to make further advances. At this point, scientists don't believe they can completely eliminate the need for chemical fertilizer.

The World Students Society thanks Eric Lapton.