ANU’s National Computational Infrastructure is letting the world know at the work they’re doing deep in the cells of plans to make them photosynthesise more efficiently.
The effect of this would be plants that grow food faster while sucking more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. A bit of a win-win for the current circumstances, although in the wild the capacity to really unbalance an ecosystem would make the blood run cold.
“At the heart of the process is an enigmatic enzyme, Rubisco, which pulls CO2 from the air enabling plants to convert its carbon into proteins, sugars, starches, oils, celluloses and other useful substances. However, despite a couple of billion years of evolution, Rubisco is still rather inefficient at what it does, leaving plenty of room for improvement,” Professor Jill Gready says.
“Our studies aim to find out why Rubisco is so inefficient, and to use this information to re-engineer it for improved efficiency. Even modest improvements offer major scope to enhance light, water and nutrient utilization by plants and, hence, to create higher-yielding food crops, to green deserts and to restore degraded landscapes. Another application could be improved tree Rubiscos that can lock up more CO2 and fight climate change, or adaptation of suitable plants for sustainable high-yield biofuel production,” she explains.
[Photo by Thomas, attribution licence.]
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