The company is developing crops that tolerate salty soils.
Around the world, a billion acres of agricultural land lay abandoned. In the United States, 15 million acres of cropland falls under this category. Decades of repeated irrigation and declining water quality have made much of this once-productive land too salty to support plant growth. Among the strategies to put this land back to use is to develop crops that can tolerate high-salinity soils.
Last week, Ceres, a biotechnology company in Thousand Oaks, CA, announced that it had developed a trait that allows several common crops to grow under highly saline conditions, even in seawater. Ceres researchers have tested the trait in Arabidopsis thaliana, rice, and switchgrass, a hardy perennial that's used as a feedstock for making ethanol and other biofuels. "The fact that we've seen this very high-level salt tolerance in three different plant species gives us a high degree of confidence that this trait will recapitulate itself in other energy grasses as well," says Ceres CEO Richard Hamilton.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Technology Review: Startup Aims to Bring Useless Farmland Back to Life
Author: Corinna Wu
