Ryan Sartor

Bio

The Lemna Improvement and Functional Transcriptomics (LIFT) laboratory was established in 2022 at NCSU. We are working to develop a novel crop species using Lemna gibba (Lemna). This plant has the ability to grow on wastewater, produce several times more biomass/acre than existing crops and generates high quality biomass with >30% protein or >30% starch. These properties make Lemna a great candidate for implementation of novel sustainable agricultural systems that reuse wastewater for nutrients and produce valuable products like food or fuel. However, this species is wild and has never been domesticated or bred for use in agriculture. Our major effort is toward the domestication and selective breeding of this plant to produce new varieties that are specifically adapted for use in sustainable agricultural systems. Currently, we have projects working with municipal wastewater and swine wastewater. We are using custom high-throughput phenotyping systems combined with genomic analysis to develop varieties of Lemna that have dramatically increased yields on these specific waste streams and produce biomass that can be used for biofuels, animal feed or agricultural amendments.