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Scientists Have 'Hacked Photosynthesis' To Boost Crop Growth By 40 Percent (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: There's a big molecule, a protein, inside the leaves of most plants. It's called Rubisco, which is short for an actual chemical name that's very long and hard to remember. Rubisco has one job. It picks up carbon dioxide from the air, and it uses the carbon to make sugar molecules. It gets the energy to do this from the sun. This is photosynthesis, the process by which plants use sunlight to make food, a foundation of life on Earth. "But it has what we like to call one fatal flaw," Amanda Cavanagh, a biologist and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Illinois, says. Unfortunately, Rubisco isn't picky enough about what it grabs from the air. It also picks up oxygen. "When it does that, it makes a toxic compound, so the plant has to detoxify it."
Plants have a whole complicated chemical assembly line to carry out this detoxification, and the process uses up a lot of energy. This means the plant has less energy for making leaves, or food for us. Cavanagh and her colleagues in a research program called Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), which is based at the University of Illinois, have spent the last five years trying to fix Rubisco's problem. "We're sort of hacking photosynthesis," she says. They experimented with tobacco plants, just because tobacco is easy to work with. They inserted some new genes into these plants, which shut down the existing detoxification assembly line and set up a new one that's way more efficient. And they created super tobacco plants. "They grew faster, and they grew up to 40 percent bigger" than normal tobacco plants, Cavanagh says. These measurements were done both in greenhouses and open-air field plots. The scientists are trying to apply this technique to other plants, like tomatoes, soybeans, and black-eyed peas, which are a staple food crop for a lot of farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Cavanagh and her colleagues published their work this week in the journal Science.
Plants have a whole complicated chemical assembly line to carry out this detoxification, and the process uses up a lot of energy. This means the plant has less energy for making leaves, or food for us. Cavanagh and her colleagues in a research program called Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), which is based at the University of Illinois, have spent the last five years trying to fix Rubisco's problem. "We're sort of hacking photosynthesis," she says. They experimented with tobacco plants, just because tobacco is easy to work with. They inserted some new genes into these plants, which shut down the existing detoxification assembly line and set up a new one that's way more efficient. And they created super tobacco plants. "They grew faster, and they grew up to 40 percent bigger" than normal tobacco plants, Cavanagh says. These measurements were done both in greenhouses and open-air field plots. The scientists are trying to apply this technique to other plants, like tomatoes, soybeans, and black-eyed peas, which are a staple food crop for a lot of farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Cavanagh and her colleagues published their work this week in the journal Science.
Call it hacking and it's good, call it GMO and it's bad.
"This one simple trick a woman discovered in her lab!"
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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You're assuming a random sequence of mutation has had time to randomly find this by chance. Once found natural selection will ensure its success. The selection does not find the mutation.
It would be great if we could put this to use in something for generating bio-fuels.
Agreed, Plants have a long history. If we can create so many complicated organs and functions, i would assume they would have developed more. Watch all the plants die when O2 spikes after we get rid of the carbon dioxide in the air.
Probably invented Tomacco. The Simpson's will be suing them for copyright violation.
There is a light dependent reaction that creates ATP, which is the energy source for the light independent Calvin cycle which actually reduces CO2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I am not sure what they have hacked, but it is more complex than the summary suggests. And it would be an amazing achievement to be able to improve a system perfected by 4 billion years of evolution without any down side. I suspect there is a downside, maybe a need for more water etc.
Well done anyway, if true.
make the best thing. It makes the most successful thing among other things, but that's not "best". Ever wonder why we get scurvy? We have a defective gene that prevents us from making Vitamin C. We compensated in other ways, but that doesn't mean we're the "best", just better than the alternatives.
Same deal here. Think of all the energy wasted out there and imagine if we didn't waste it. Look at bananas. They start out barely edible and end up as convenient as anything you'd buy in a plastic bag.
Now, there are potential downsides to a mono-culture, but then if we can tweak genes at will we don't have to have a mono-culture, do we?
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There are two reasons why you're wrong:
1. Mutation can miss many optimal routes due it it being overwhelmingly a minor step-by-step process rather than a massive leap. Evolution works as relative competition against others. If no one has this change, you don't have to compete against it. And if they have to literally replace the entire system with another, chance of evolution developing it is not all that high. This is because developing such a system as a random sequence of mutations would be a very costly thing, while having to maintain the old system until the new one is fully evolved.
2. The mutation might actually have significant long term weakening of the plant itself against some competition, where it would need cultivation by another much more powerful species to make it an evolutionary winner. I.e. agriculture.
I find it a bit amusing that you proceeded to ALSO not give us the actual name despite complaint...
It is:
Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase
I agree, it was not THAT long. Probably whatever grammar checker system they had refused to let it pass. Or like you say he was just lazy and thought all his readers were morons. Either way, not a good look.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The worst thing is that it's actually not even that long:
"Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase, commonly known by the abbreviations Rubisco or rubisco [1], RuBPCase, or RuBPco" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )
Deoxyribonucleic acid isn't that much shorter and pretty much every high schooler who learned about genetics has at least heard it once.
Some plants HAVE evolved ways of improving CO2 capture. It's just that the vast majority of the food crops people desire to eat are still using the old mechanism. Do some research on C3 vs. C4 and CAM photosythesis. Corn is one of the few food crops that uses the newer C4 photosynthesis engine. Corn's productivity is likely one reason why pretty much all of our cheap junk food today contains corn in some form or another.
... shut down the existing detoxification assembly line and set up a new one that's way more efficient. And they created super tobacco plants.
They made the detoxifying process way more efficient and made super tobacco, which is probably more toxic.
Wonder if smoking it will give you super cancer?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
..."It hops & pops because you put frog & chili DNA in it? Jeez!"
Table-ized A.I.
Plants don't use up oxygen. They re-generate oxygen from carbon dioxide... And they typically don't use nitrogen from the air, although some plants (peas, peanuts, etc) symbiotically live with bacteria that pull nitrogen from the air.
Some plants HAVE evolved ways of improving CO2 capture.
The evolution of the C4 pathway happened in grasses, and they spread around the world about 6-7 million years ago. Tropical savanna replaced woodland in Africa, as the grasses outcompeted forests via more efficient photosynthesis. Hominids moved out of the forest into the expanding savanna, learning to walk upright, freeing up their hands to use tools.
The C4 pathway also meant plants could pull more CO2 out of the atmosphere, lowering global temperatures. The spread of C4-capable grasses may have been the main trigger for the ice ages.
Corn is one of the few food crops that uses the newer C4 photosynthesis engine.
Another big C4 crop is sugar cane. Millet and sorghum are also C4.
Is it too much to ask that the title matches the description of the article? "Scientists hack photosynthesis" ... yet in the very same description: "Plants have a whole complicated chemical assembly line to carry out this detoxification, and the process uses up a lot of energy. This means the plant has less energy for making leaves, or food for us. Cavanagh and her colleagues in a research program called Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), which is based at the University of Illinois, have spent the last five years trying to fix Rubisco's problem. "We're sort of hacking photosynthesis," she says". So they hacked a downstream process not photosynthesis. This type of sloppy journalism is what is making me loose all faith in this profession. Either read what you wrote or don't even bother. Thanks
In the case of vitamin C, we are missing a single nucleic acid pair that would render it functional and we could produce our own vitamin C. Our distant ancestral species had this functionality and it was lost along the way. No big deal because of our diet.
I was under the impression that the evolution of C4 was the result of falling CO2 levels, not the cause. And as anyone can see, a grassland has far less biomass per given area than a forest so they're hardly a great carbon sink.
Still not calling you back after fucking you in the ass for your science denial in that thread several months ago. No matter how desperately you stalk me on slashdot.
So one problem that comes up here is that giving a plant species such a powerful advantage will change where it can and can't grow. Plants that can't typically grow wild in a region could easily become a noxious weed if they have a +40% resource bonus. Sure, it's great for any organisms that are above these new plants in the food chain, but not great for species being displaced and the organisms that depend on them for survival. Normally I'm all for GMOs, but this one scares me a bit.
Plants respire at night using up O2 which more or less balances with what they release in the day. Back to school for you.
Nitrate assimilation in plant shoots depends on photorespiration "nitrate assimilation in both dicotyledonous and monocotyledonous species depends on photorespiration. ... raises concerns about genetic manipulations to diminish photorespiration in crops. ... Extensive efforts to increase the specificity of Rubisco for CO2 relative to O2 and thereby increase the productivity of C3 crops have proved unsuccessful (5). Our results indicate that such efforts might have hitherto unforeseen consequences: in agricultural systems where NO3- is the dominant form of inorganic nitrogen, minimizing photorespiration may be associated with nitrogen deprivation."
Now, the new result isn't "minimizing photorespiration", it's exchanging the procedure entirely. How will this affect the plant's ability to uptake nitrogen? The articles does not address this question. Do they avoid describing the manner in which their test plants were fertilized?
Thanks for this insight, P and GP.
*This* (and the whole IP argument) is what's worrisome about GMO, not that we're doing research on it, or putting some targeted beneficial things into existing crops (e.g. Golden Rice). Do we have the ability, capability and *will* to control these artificial interventions if they manage to spread out into the wild and do damage? I don't think we do. I mean, what's our track record on introducing foreign species into relatively closed ecosystems? No need to even engineer anything to fuck something up.
That's why GMO needs a very nuanced and conservative approach (no, not a ban, either). Otherwise it'll just be another problem for future generations to sort out, like nuclear waste. We don't need any more "screw what comes after if I can make a buck today, right?" mentality.
https://www.pthorticulture.com...
http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/ge...
Do yourself a favour and get an education sometime.
So taking the Frankenstein Food aspect off the table, what sbout using this same technique to scrub CO2 out of the air? If it uses thess resources to detoxify then it stands to reason that all that reclaimed energy could go into plant growth. Re-seeding the rain forest (our biggest counter to CO2 levels) could take less time if this were to be applied to those species. One thing to be on the alert for is to ensure we are not creating new invasive species. 40% efficiency boosts can also mean sustainability in normally hostile environments. Perhaps a potential need for lunar or martian food crops?
Like Golden Rice? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yes, plants use a little O2 at night, but that does NOT balance out with the O2 they liberated from CO2 during the day.
You're forgetting that as a plant grows, a large portion of the carbon taken from the air is locked up in its biomass. You won't get the balance in O2 consumption you seek until the plant's biomass has been fully decomposed away. And technically speaking, decomposition is not something that the plants do, that's the job of animals, insects, bacteria, and fungi that are eating the plants.
I thought the same thing, but then I saw the name:
Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase
Commonly known by the abbreviations Rubisco or rubisco, RuBPCase, or RuBPco,
Essentially, unlike something complex-but-used like CRISPR/DNA/CAMphotosynthesis, even the scientists who study it don't use the full name.
Nature is not an idiot that is going to be fixed by mankind. If she uses the original inefficient detox process it may be for a reason. Probably is. Evolution would have selected bigger, faster long ago. So, wait for why it fails or doesn't do what they want exactly. Is the bigger, faster even eatable?
E Proelio Veritas.
No. Ice ages go back way before grasses.
So when will we start seeing one of the benefits of scientific research?
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Yeow. Back to school with you, sir. If what you say were true, animals would deplete the O2 and we'd all be dead.
Neither of those links support your assertion that at night plants consume all (or even most) of the O2 they produce during the day ("more or less balances with what they release in the day").
Justin Trudeau noted that Canada's primary interest in this technology would have nothing whatsoever to do with tobacco.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
There is also an assumption that being 40% larger is an ecological benefit.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
grassland has far less biomass per given area than a forest
Grasslands have far more carbon in the soil than forests.
Grasslands can grow in arid regions that don't have enough rainfall to support forests.
Species generally don't give a crap about ecology. They do what's in the interests of their species. Plants evolve traits that give them the best shot at the environment they grow in. Animals do exactly the same.
Every single species on the planet affects the ecology in some way, just humans have found a way to affect it the most.
If you get a 40% increase in biomass for the same investment in various pesticides, herbicides and general land use, you can either increase your production (if there's a market for it), or decrease the rate at which new land is required to maintain food production for the population (allowing the 'natural' ecosystems to last longer).
So I'd say there's a definitely ecological benefit.
Then you should take off the "I don't understand this argument because you're an idiot" glasses and put the "I don't understand this argument because I'm an idiot" ones.
Because you need not look beyond human gestation process to see exactly what I was talking about here. There's a clear cut evolutionary reason why the process of development effectively starts humans as fish with gills, that get apoptized as we slowly progress to something that resembles a mammal. Evolution does not build new systems as a matter of rule, and exceptions to this are extremely rare. It instead adds to existing ones, which is why humans still contain the genetic code to begin gestating as a fish.
The system being talked about here is a completely new system that would entirely replace the old one. Evolution is very bad at generating such systems.
So a twice as efficient hacked-plant gets loose in the external environment. Probably takes over the whole niche and spreads globally, because, you know, more efficient more survival probability.
But then it turns out the hack led to another unanticipated weakness in the plant species's long term prospects, e.g. vulnerability to a lethal viral infection.
So the "smart replacement" plant gets wiped out globally.
When you are hacking genomes, you could be hacking whole global-scale ecosystems. Your safety protocols better reflect that. And they never do.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If there is such an agenda why are we currently boosting population growth in Africa? Without western aid the population would be a fraction of what we will make it in 20-50 years.
>C4 overcomes the tendency of the enzyme RuBisCO
Ah. RuBisCo fold. Brings back the memories from the 90s
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
...that the plants produce the toxin because it provides them with an evolutionary advantage against predators. Nope.
Thank you for responding, but that is a benefit to humans for changing the plant. The original question was why hasn't nature found this innovation on its own over millions of years of evolution. My posit was that there was not benefit to the PLANT in being 40% larger.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba