About a quarter of wood consists of something called lignin. While lignin serves an important role for trees, helping them grow taller and get more sunshine, the paper and fiber industries have to remove it because it lowers the quality of their products.

To help solve this problem, researchers at North Carolina State University investigated how to create trees with less lignin. They used a predictive machine learning model to identify genes in poplar trees that they could alter in order to create the ideal specimen.

They ultimately generated 174 engineered tree lines using a genetic engineering technique called CRISPR. These were grown inside a greenhouse for six months and showed improvements in desired properties compared to their wild counterparts — the most drastic cases saw a 29% decrease in lignin content and a 228% increase in cellulose-to-lignin ratio.

Though many of the edited trees grew slower, the scientists predict that CRISPR-edited wood will boost fiber production efficiency. Less lignin content also means less energetic and chemical output required to remove it, which translates to less planet-warming pollution.

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