Could Duckweed Undo Pollution, Fight Global Warming And Alleviate World Hunger?
ScienceDaily (July 8, 2008) — Three plant biologists at Rutgers’ Waksman Institute of Microbiology are obsessed with duckweed, a tiny aquatic plant with an unassuming name. Now they have convinced the federal government to focus its attention on duckweed’s tremendous potential for cleaning up pollution, combating global warming and feeding the world. This enterprise builds upon Rutgers’ burgeoning energy and environmental research and the important contributions Waksman Institute scientists have already made to plant genomics, including the sequencing of rice, sorghum and corn. At the behest of the Rutgers scientists and their colleagues from five other institutions, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will channel resources at its national laboratories into sequencing the genome of the lowly duckweed. The DOE’s Joint Genome Institute announced on July 2 that its Community Sequencing Program will support the genomic sequencing of duckweed (Spirodela polyrhiza) as one of its priority pr