Turbocharging a new ‘green revolution’
Plant scientists have ambitious plans to improve crop yields by limitations of photosynthesis.
December 2011
Wasteful, inefficient, a ‘relic of a bygone age’ – all indictments that have been levelled at RuBisCO, the most abundant protein in nature and the heart of the reaction that feeds life on Earth. The enzyme is the powerhouse behind photosynthesis, responsible for taking CO2 from the atmosphere and using the sun’s energy to convert it into the sugars that crops need to grow.
But, as its full name, Ribulose 1,5-Bisphosphate Carboxylase/Oxygenase, might suggest, the enzyme has an unfortunate tendency to promiscuity. It evolved at a time when the Earth’s atmosphere was very different to the 500-fold excess of O2 over CO2 that we have today and, as a result, it sometimes mistakes O2 for CO2, to the detriment of potential plant productivity.
Plant scientists such as Dr Julian Hibberd and Professor Howard Griffiths, believe that overcoming this inefficiency could be the key both to achieving a leap in the amount of food or energy a plant can produce from the same amount of sunlight and to revitalising the ‘green revolution’, which has been slowing as the yields of elite cultivars approach their natural limits.
The two scientists, both funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), aim to maximise the operating efficiency of RuBisCO by turbocharging it with an increased concentration of CO2.
External links
Read more of this article on the University of Cambridge Research Features website.
Enhancing photosynthesis has been the subject of blog posts on this website by Riaz Bhunnoo and Peter Horton.
