The complexity of microbial communities has been a major obstacle to discovering technologies that can prevent diseases and improve agriculture. It’s a critical step toward curbing methane, a harmful greenhouse gas that is emitted during rice production.

The crop is grown in flooded fields. That water cuts off oxygen to the soil, which allows methane-producing microbes to thrive: Rice production is responsible for as much as 34 million tons of methane a year, or about 2% of greenhouse-gas emissions. China and India make up half that total.

Rice fields are like smokestacks for soil methane, and to shut down those emissions, scientists first need to understand the microbes. The trouble has been that culturing microbial communities and tinkering with them in a lab with traditional tools “could take years or might fail altogether,” IGI authors write. Their new paper demonstrates that using a Crispr-based system can “accelerate this process to weeks.”

Timothy Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, welcomes progress toward a high-ambition, high-reward genetic-engineering breakthrough in concert with proven real-world techniques—the topic of a policy paper he issued in November.

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