Gabriel Licina: EnTS- rapid forestation

A proposal by SciHouse

Good morning. My name is Gabriel Licina. I think I know a lot of you. I'm going to talk about something that is my own personal project instea dof the things that I usually work on and people hrear about. There's the stuff that pays the bills... and then there's the stuff that you really care about.

I have this project called EnTs. It was originally a joke. It was called "aggressive reforestation" but that sounded a little too aggressive. We started calling it EnTs because it's a tolkein joke. A buddy of mine in the crowd somewhere, asked if this was an acronym of something. Could it be an acronym? Okay, sure. It's called "engineered tree systems".

A proven method for tunring meager soil into fertile substrate

Seeds tailoed for region and climate (evneutally includign bioengineered vairants)

There was a Milwaukee method.. wherever you see that thing pop up on your facebook feed about dude in parkistan truned empty parking lot into a forest in a method. That was just a planting method. The other one is some kind of stuff that we borrowed from the lumbe rand sugar cane industry. Taking these two togehter, it's about making really robust forests. I don't know if you have noticed, but it kind of sucks outside. The changing of the climate- I think there's a phrase for it....

The Miyawaki method... is about high-density planting, that works to create really rapid "aforestation"- creating a forest where one did not previously exist. This has been shown to take areas that are basically I don't know, what you see when you loo koutside of this venue, and turn them into small forests. You can grow up to 3 meters in 6 months. That's my baseline. That's without genetic modification or any other tech whatsoever. That's just the starting point. Three meters, in 6 months, to grow microforests.

The cool thing comes when you start working with this technology used by these other industries for increasing their yield. There are two genes- PXY, and CLE41. You can think of these as-- one of them makes the legoes, and the other one puts the legoes together. If you only upregulate one of these, you get floppy trees, and if you upregulate both of these, you get trees that grow 2x as fast. It's been tested on birch, asper trees, etc. Birch is a completely different genus, and it's been tested on Arabdisopsis, and white pine, and sugar cane. You know how hard it is to find an accessible picture of a sugar cane that doesn't look like it came off of Amazon? The tech is really simple. Do we have anyone here that does plant work. Yeah, plant work people represent. All one of them. Woo.

So for those of you who don't know, we're past the proof-of-concept point. What I want to do is see if we can go beyond industry and take it to something where you modify your local plants and you start developing robust ecosystems. Technically it should work on anything with a cell wall. That's like everything-- ferns, moss, the whole kit and caboodle. For those of you don't know how plant modification works, you start with your ... you get your gene of interest there, for us it's PXY and PTSSCLE casette... just smack it in there using very standard techniques, we go from there and put it into agrobacterium and we take the agrobacterium and we get our leaf sample, we extract some DNA from that, and you know the next step (censored). And at the end, you get a big leaf. It's kind of ridiculous, but that's how easy it is.

The reason for this is-- I don't know if you guys have noticed, but it sucks out there in the climate. To circumvent any further conversations I'll have with something about "oh gosh genetically modified organisms in the wild", well, we've been selectively breeding and poisnoing things for the last 10,000 years and nobody cared about that. So is this where we're going to draw the line now? When we're trying to do something positive for once? I think the answer is no.

It's a project pitch. It's not a product pitch or a company pitch. It's about taking the tools and experience that we're all developing and building something that might have a positive impact on the planet.