Quest Fulfilled? Holy Grail Found? 40% Crop Yield Increase Really Possible?
by Helena Tavares Kennedy (Biofuels Digest) … (S)cientists in Illinois may have just gotten incredibly close to finding the treasure that any crop producer has been searching for. In field testing across two different growing seasons, they showed >25% increase in biomass of pathway 3 plants compared to wild type, and with RNAi productivity increased by >40%.
We can only imagine the conversation among the scientists when they discovered a way to increase crop growth by 40% in the field. Really, something we thought never possible. Something we only dreamed of. We’d get excited over a 4% yield increase, but a 40% increase?
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Photosynthesis produces toxic by-products that reduce its efficiency in crop growth and the quest to somehow improve or fix photosynthetic inefficiencies has been the focus of University of Illinois and Global Change and Photosynthesis Research Unit researchers from the United States Department of Agriculture–Agricultural Research Service in Urbana.
Large gains in crop productivity are possible through enhancing photosynthetic efficiency. In some of our most useful crops (such as soybean, rice and wheat), photorespiration deals with these by-products, converting them into metabolically useful components, but at the cost of energy lost. But researchers constructed a metabolic pathway in transgenic tobacco plants that more efficiently recaptures the unproductive by-products of photosynthesis with less energy lost. In field trials, these transgenic tobacco plants were ∼40% more productive than wild-type tobacco plants. You got that right…40% more productive…not in a lab setting, not in some hypothetical situation, but in a real world field.
How’d they do it?
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This could potentially lead to lower costs for buyers of these crops. Think about it…growers grow 40% more on their fields, yet they don’t need more land or resources to grow 40% more, so they have more to sell. This could lower the price of those feedstocks so that buyers benefit from this as well. Could this lead to lower cost biofuels and biomaterials? If this type of huge crop yield increase really does translate over to other crops like soybeans, corn, jatropha, miscanthus and any of the many other biofuel and biomaterial feedstocks, then this is indeed like finding the holy grail, and not just for growers. READ MORE
Synthetic glycolate metabolism pathways stimulate crop growth and productivity in the field (Science Magazine)
Structure and function of photosynthetic protein elucidated in detail / Struktur und Funktion von Fotosyntheseprotein im Detail aufgeklärt (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
Structural adaptations of photosynthetic complex I enable ferredoxin-dependent electron transfer (Science Magazine)
