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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."
It would be great if we could put this to use in something for generating bio-fuels.
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
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.
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.
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
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.