A team of researchers is succeeding in adapting the system of photosynthesis in plants to help them conserve water and increase food yield – and they simply add natural proteins and enzymes to the process.
A collaboration led by the University of Illinois called RIPE, Realization of increased photosynthetic efficiency, works to make plants more fertile in a world where the frequency and severity of drought may require them to be more fertile – especially for people who need to quench their hunger.
All children in school learn about photosynthesis – the process by which plants use light to convert carbon dioxide into energy – and RIPE breaks down each step in the natural solar radiation assembly line to see if different systems can be improved or not.
Previous discoveries, along with their recent study, suggest that hacking into some key photosynthetic processes could improve plant yields by more than 50%.
“Like a factory line, plants are only as fast as their slowest machines,” said Patricia Lopez-Calcagno, a postdoctoral researcher at University of Essex Partnership, which is leading this latest project for RIPE. “We have identified some slower steps, and what we are doing is allowing these plants to build more machines to accelerate these slower steps in photosynthesis.”
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Within the assembly line of the plant
The researchers targeted the first of RIPE’s targets, increasing yields, and the researchers targeted plastocyanin, a protein that works on a scheme that moves electrons to parts of the process of photosynthesis. RIPE found that plastocyanin has an affinity for another protein, and like a transit bus that disrupts its schedule by waiting too long for one stop, it slows down the electron transfer process.
The addition of cytochrome c6, a protein found in algae that has a similar function but is more efficient, could increase plants’ yield by 27%. Furthermore, because cytochrome c6 requires iron to work while plastocyanin requires copper, any imbalances in soil mineral content can be overcome by plants that choose to rely on one shuttling protein more than the other.
The next place that needed work was the Calvin-Benson cycle of the plant, in which carbon dioxide is bound in sugars that feed the plant. Increasing the amount of a key enzyme in the process by introducing cellular machine from cyanobacteria, another plant species, was found to improve the ratio of biomass produced per unit of water, making it more efficient with the water that they got.
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This is vital because research suggests that climate change may increase the frequency and severity of droughts in growing regions such as the Sahel, such as California.
“This study offers the exciting opportunity to potentially combine three proven and independent methods to achieve 20 percent increases in crop productivity,” said RIPE Director Stephen Long, University President of Plant Sciences and Plant Biology at the University of Illinois.
“Our modeling suggests that stacking this breakthrough with two previous discoveries from the RIPE project could result in additive yield gains totaling 50 to 60 percent in food crops.”
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With the help of scientists around the world, including China and Australia, RIPE is testing to see if these three changes in plant plant settings can work together to produce the higher yields – starting with tobacco, because it is easy to grow, engineer and test, and eventually move to widely used steels such as corn, cassava and soybean.
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