Georgia Tech’s Ulrika Egertsdotter is at the forefront of tree cloning technology, offering groundbreaking solutions to enhance the quality and sustainability of Georgia’s forestry industry. Discover how her work is driving innovation and climate resilience.
Georgia’s forestry industry, a colossal contributor to the state’s economy generating $40 billion annually and providing 140,000 jobs, is renowned for its timber, fiber, paper pulp and other wood-derived products, which are exported worldwide. At the heart of advancements in this industry stands Ulrika Egertsdotter, a principal research scientist at Georgia Tech’s Renewable Bioproducts Institute. Her innovative work is revolutionizing the way tree growers propagate new plants, ensuring higher-quality wood products and greater resilience to climate change.
“Some say we shouldn’t interfere with nature, but humans are demanding more and more from the Earth, faster than it can provide,” Egertsdotter said in a news release. “We need to help nature produce at a sustainable rate and quality necessary for human requirements.”
Egertsdotter’s primary research is focused on applying new technologies and automation to produce improved conifer trees, such as spruce, cedar and pine — trees quintessential to Georgia and vital worldwide for wood and fiber production.
Traditional plant breeding for desirable traits, such as drought resistance or fungal attack resilience, can take decades. However, advancements in scientific research now allow for the design of new plants that can yield better wood products and withstand extreme weather conditions.
Key to Egertsdotter’s work is somatic embryogenesis (SE), a preferred micropropagation method for cloning conifer seeds.
“In the lab, with one plant seed, we can make millions of plants from that same seed,” Egertsdotter added.
In their lab, the researchers meticulously clean a single seed to extract an embryo and place it in a nutrient-rich dish with plant-growth regulators. This process stimulates the embryo to form new embryos, which continuously multiply into identical copies. The embryos are then matured and germinated into new plants, a process markedly faster than natural growth cycles.
“The biological process the lab (somatic) embryo goes through to form the plant is the same biological process a seed embryo would go through if it was planted in the ground,” Egertsdotter added. “This method allows us to generate many plants from each valuable seed, instead of just one.”
While micropropagation methods have existed for decades, they are often cost-prohibitive and labor-intensive. To address this, Egertsdotter collaborates with engineers to create novel automation technologies powered by fluidics technology, image analysis and AI-based selection. The SE Fluidics System at Georgia Tech is a facility enabling rapid imaging and algorithmic selection of viable embryos for further processing.
In addition to cloning, these technologies facilitate the incorporation of desired traits through genetic editing tools like CRISPR, ushering in a new era of crop adaptability and resilience.
Egertsdotter is investigating methods to enhance pine trees’ resistance to climate-related stresses, such as pests and drought, and studying how biotechnological tools can create trees that capture carbon dioxide more efficiently. This urgency stems from the tangible impact of human-induced climate change on natural habitats.
“We must support the plants we rely on by multiplying the specific plants that can survive in the future environment,” Egertsdotter said. “We can also help other plants survive by genetic or genomic modifications to increase their adaptability.”
She poignantly added, “We will lose a lot of the natural resources we currently rely on if we wait for nature to, through natural selection, correct the negative impact of climate change. We are changing the natural world faster than evolution can keep up, so we must help accelerate the adaptation process.”
Egertsdotter’s pioneering work not only promises to boost the forestry industry but also highlights the critical role of science and technology in safeguarding our natural resources against the advancing threats of climate change.