“This research is still only directed to freshwater plants which predominate the human food supply based on the shrinking 3% of freshwater on this planet. Better for funds to shift to the other half of Earth’s plant kingdom: the food crops from salt-loving plants which grow on the 97% of the planet’s saltwater. See our Green Transition Scoreboard® 2018 ”CAPTURING CO2 WHILE IMPROVING HUMAN NUTRITION & HEALTH”.
~Hazel Henderson, Editor”
Scientists boost crop production by 47 percent by speeding up photorespiration
- Date:
- May 31, 2018
- Source:
- Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Summary:
- Increasing production of a common, naturally occurring protein in plant leaves could boost the yields of major food crops by almost 50 percent, according to a new study.
Plants such as soybeans and wheat waste between 20 and 50 percent of their energy recycling toxic chemicals created when the enzyme Rubisco — the most prevalent enzyme in the world — grabs oxygen molecules instead of carbon dioxide molecules. Increasing production of a common, naturally occurring protein in plant leaves could boost the yields of major food crops by almost 50 percent, according to a new study led by scientists at the University of Essex published today in Plant Biotechnology Journal.
This work is part of the international research project Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) that is supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, and U.K. Department for International Development.
In this study, the team engineered a model crop to overexpress a native protein that is involved in the recycling process called photorespiration. Over two years of field trials, they found that increasing the H-protein in the plants’ leaves increases production 27 to 47 percent. However, increasing this protein throughout the plant stunts growth and metabolism, resulting in four-week-old plants that are half the size of their unaltered counterparts.
“Plant scientists have traditionally used promoters that express proteins at high levels throughout the plant, and there are many examples where this has worked really well,” said the lead author Patricia Lopez-Calcagno, a senior research officer at Essex. “But for the H-protein, we showed that more is not always better demonstrating that when we translate this method to other crop plants, we will need to tune the changes in protein to the right levels in the right tissues.”