Riverside County Innovation Month Brochure

The College of Natural & Agricultural Sciences (CNAS) is home to world-renowned scholars pursuing research that deepens our knowledge of the universe we live in and improves the quality of life for inhabitants of the state, the nation, and the world. Central to this research is educating the students who come to CNAS to learn about science and who leave with an integrated approach to how they can change the world. These students, and the faculty who teach them, benefit from a structure that is unique among land-grant colleges: CNAS’s 13 departments encompass the life, physical, mathematical, and agricultural sciences. ALUMINUM RESISTANCE IN PLANTS: Principal Investigator, Paul Larsen, developed a prototype crop and validated the technology. One project objective was to modify maize to be tolerant to aluminum toxicity in soils. In addition, through this tolerance mode of action, enhanced levels of plant-based carbon are added to the soil which could significantly contribute to the effort to capture and sequester atmospheric CO2 and reduce the rate of global warming. AFTER WILDFIRES, DO MICROBES EXHALE POTENT GREENHOUSE GAS? : A research team CARBON CAPTURE AND THE

led by UC Riverside mycologist Sydney Glassman will spend the next three years answering this question, examining how bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea work together in post-fire soils to affect nitrous oxide emissions.

Their work is supported by a new $3.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. “Nitrogen in the form of nitrous oxide, and the microbes that regulate it, are a less well-studied aspect of the problem, but an aspect we must solve to more fully understand how the planet is changing, and how much we can expect it to keep changing,” she said. The fires themselves send warming gases into the atmosphere, but they also irretrievably change the soil microbiome. In the post-fire environment, ‘fire loving’ microbes that were previously undetectable take over, with unknown results.

Agricultural Innovation within Riverside County, at the UCR research center.