Plant Biology

Plants are unparalleled in their ability to capture CO₂ from the air, but this benefit is temporary, as leftover crops release carbon back into the atmosphere. A more permanent, and even useful, fate for this captured carbon could be turning plants into a valuable industrial material called silicon carbide (SiC). Professor Joseph Noel, Visiting Scientist James La Clair, and Staff Researcher and first author Suzanne Thomas transformed tobacco and corn husks into SiC and quantified the process with more detail than ever before. The findings are crucial to helping researchers evaluate and quantify carbon-sequestration strategies to potentially mitigate climate change as CO₂ levels continue to rise to unprecedented levels.