Plants use resources, such as minerals and water, to promote their growth, but they also are restrained by the enzymes they need to complete photosynthesis, particularly an enzyme commonly known as RuBisCo.
Both plants and bacteria rely on RuBisCo to fix, or transform, carbon dioxide in the initial stages of photosynthesis. Unfortunately, RuBisCo can also react with oxygen, creating an unusable molecule that the plant must spend further energy to recycle. The result wastes far more nutrients than the plants need, costing both resources and money, and places a theoretical limit on crop yields.
Recently, research teams from Cornell University and Rothamsted Research in the United Kingdom began looking for ways around this barrier. They selected genes from bacteria that have evolved a way to bypass this dilemma and inserted them into plant cells, hoping that the bacterial addition would bestow the same advantages onto plants and provide food crops a way to boost yields under the pressures imposed by climate change.
"If proved effective, this technology would decrease the amount of key nutrients like nitrogen and, most notably, water needed by the plant, while increasing the yield," said Lin Myat, a postdoctoral fellow of molecular biology and genetics at Cornell and lead on the study. Both nutrients are valuable additions to any crop plant, especially under the pressure of increasing droughts.
In some key food crops, such as wheat or rice, the unwanted RuBisCo reaction happens roughly one-quarter of the time. While some crop plants like corn have devised ways to reduce the likeliness of this wasteful reaction, they require additional energy to do so. With a growing population to feed and limited resources, finding new ways to avoid the RuBisCo problem without expending extra energy in crop plants has become an increasingly studied topic.
Scientists Look to Bacteria to Protect Crop Yields in the Face of Climate Change
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