Whereas improved photosynthetic efficiency has played only a minor role in the remarkable increases in productivity achieved in the last half century, further increases in yield potential will rely in large part on improved photosynthesis. Stimulating photosynthetic processes increases productivity and water-use efficiency in the field (Nature Plants) August 21, 2020 / in Plant Science Research Weekly / by Camila Ribeiro Yield potential in crops is determined by the efficiency of photosynthetic rates, which is a critical target for improvement. At the same time, the team has improved a photosynthetic bottleneck in the Calvin-Benson Cycle -- wherein carbon dioxide is fixed into sugars -- by bulking up the amount of a key enzyme called SBPase, borrowing the additional cellular machinery from another plant species and cyanobacteria. The RIPE project is an international effort led by the University of Illinois to develop more productive crops by improving photosynthesis -- the natural, sunlight-powered process that all plants use to fix carbon dioxide into sugars that fuel growth, development, and ultimately yield. Inside chloroplasts, plants have a system called NPQ, or nonphotochemical quenching, for this purpose. RIPE is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the U.S. Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR), and the U.K. Government's Department for International Development (DFID). Any new technology licensed from this work will be made freely available to farmers in poor countries in Africa and South Asia. European Scientist: Scientists increase crop production by 47%. Red and yellow regions represent low NPQ activity, while blue and purple areas show high levels induced by exposure to light. This research was supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Get the latest science news with ScienceDaily's free email newsletters, updated daily and weekly. Niyogi and his postdoctoral research associates Lauriebeth Leonelli, Stéphane Gabilly, and Masakazu Iwai figured out a way to speed up recovery from photoprotection and demonstrated a proof of this concept in the laboratory. Greenhouse crop production: canopy photosynthesis, growth modelling, and spectrum conversion film 2. The team at Dr Sayre’s lab has also produced several studies that suggest that capturing CO 2 by algae This, in turn, can be achieved by altering the ratio of the photosynthetic pigments, chlorophyll a and b. Raising the water-use efficiency of both irrigated and rain-fed crop production is an urgent imperative (Hamdy et al., 2003).Of the world's allocatable water resource, c. 80% is currently consumed by irrigated agriculture.This level of consumption by agriculture is not sustainable into the future. "Our modeling suggests that stacking this breakthrough with two previous discoveries from the RIPE project could result in additive yield gains totaling as much as 50 to 60 percent in food crops.". Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), UC Berkeley, and the University of Illinois targeted three genes involved in a process plants use to protect themselves from damage when they get more light than they can safely use. January 5, 2021 By: Claire Benjamin . This review attempts to develop a mechanistic understanding of the effects of N on crop biomass accumulation by elucidating quantitative relationships among leaf N content, CO 2 assimilation rate, and crop radiation use efficiency. The C 4 photosynthetic pathway is a CO 2 -concentrating mechanism that generally enables C 4 plants to achieve greater efficiency in their use of light, nitrogen, and water than C 3 plants. Yet these advances have not resulted from improving the photosynthetic process per se but rather of altering the way carbon is partitioned within the plant. This is the third breakthrough for the research project Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE); however, this photosynthetic hack has also been shown to conserve water. A number of plant features and traits, such as overall plant architecture, leaf structure and morphological features, vascular architecture and flowering time are important determinants of photosynthetic efficiency and hence the overall performance of crop plants. Here’s to a 2021 where CHC eventually won’t have to exist because…, a new method to rapidly test gene expression. By boosting the expression of three genes involved in NPQ, they showed that NPQ turned off more quickly, and the efficiency of photosynthesis in the shade was higher. However, the pressure in the journal science in green microalgae and cyanobacteria, but has... 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