ARPA-E Webinar: Tools for Bioenergy Crop Genetic Engineering

Genetic engineering has the potential to improve the productivity, resilience, and diversity of our bioenergy supply, but existing tools for engineering bioenergy crops have severe limitations. The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) is considering a program to develop new tools which allow bioenergy crops to be engineered with increased speed, throughput, and generalizability. Disruptive innovations are needed to increase the speed with which engineered tissues can be regenerated or bypass regeneration altogether, to increase the number of engineered plants a technician can produce, and to decrease the genotype-dependence of engineering methods. This would make bioenergy crop engineering accessible to a wider group of researchers and enable the rapid innovation necessary for agriculture to enhance the economic and energy security of the United States, while decreasing American reliance on imported energy.

I hope you will be able to join a short informational webinar to discuss the agency’s interests in this topic. Attendees will be able to submit questions for consideration.