Advanced BioFuels USA

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest)… Some years ago, the RIPE team went down the rabbit hole of transforming photosynthesis,”harnessing the sun to help the feed the world,” on the noble theory that if plants are more efficient, we’ll have more food, fiber, fuel, and what have you.

I’ve stood on the docks of academe and shouted God Speed! to many a team sailing toward the sun and the New World, aiming to expand PAR (photosynthetically active radiation), improve RuBisCo, and chase the transformation of photosynthesis. Generally, they returned home like the bedraggled survivors of shipwreck.

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Somewhere upriver in the Land of Unusual Thinking they have discovered a means of improving yields in food crops by as much as twenty percent. That’s the boost in soybeans that has been shown in their research and trials. 

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Lacking umbrellas, when the light is heavy, they (plants) produce a protein that dissipates the energy as heat. Sort of the same as you do, when skin gets sunburned, it gives off heat.

Evolution should have made a switch mechanism that moved as fast as clouds passing overhead, or the sun changing angles and passing behind a tree and throwing shade. Plants should be able to toggle on and off rapidly. But, they can’t. It takes several minutes to throw the switch.

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The RIPE team  rebuilt three genes that code for proteins of the xanthophyll cycle, which is a pigment cycle that helps in the photoprotection of the plants.

The technology story

The researchers report:

Once in full sunlight, this cycle is activated in the leaves to protect them from damage, allowing leaves to dissipate the excess energy. However, when the leaves are shaded (by other leaves, clouds, or the sun moving in the sky) this photoprotection needs to switch off so the leaves can continue the photosynthesis process with a reserve of sunlight. It takes several minutes for the plant to switch off the protective mechanism, costing plants valuable time that could have been used for photosynthesis.

The overexpression of the three genes from the VPZ construct accelerates the process, so every time a leaf transitions from light to shade the photoprotection switches off faster. Leaves gain extra minutes of photosynthesis which, when added up throughout the entire growing season, increases the total photosynthetic rate. This research has shown that despite achieving a more than 20% increase in yield, seed quality was not impacted

They tried it in tobacco, which is a model crop for researchers, and now have replicated the results in soybeans. Additional field tests of these transgenic soybean plants are being conducted this year, with results expected in early 2023.

The impact

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If this can be achieved broadly across grains and oilseeds, this is the bomb. Hard to imagine where we’ll get a 20 percent crop yield boost off a single innovation any time in my lifetime, Never say never, but I wouldn’t  bet on it. 20 percent? That’s like food, fiber or fuel for 1.6 billion people, billion with a B. As in the Bomb. That’s like India. Wow. 

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“This has been a road of more than a quarter century for me personally,” said Long (RIPE Director Stephen Long). “Starting first with a theoretical analysis of theoretical efficiency of crop photosynthesis, simulation of the complete process by high-performance computation, followed by application of optimization routines that indicated several bottlenecks in the process in our crops. Funding support over the past ten years has now allowed us to engineer alleviation of some of these indicated bottlenecks and test the products at field scale. After years of trial and tribulation, it is wonderfully rewarding to see such a spectacular result for the team.”

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RIPE is led by the University of Illinois in partnership with The Australian National University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Lancaster University, Louisiana State University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Cambridge, University of Essex, and U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service.   READ MORE