Using high-performance computing and genetic engineering to boost the photosynthetic efficiency of plants offers the best hope of increasing crop yields enough to feed a planet expected to have 9.5 billion people on it by 2050, researchers report in the journal Cell.
There has never been a better time to try this, said University of Illinois plant biology professor Stephen P. Long, who wrote the report with colleagues from Illinois and the CAS-MPG Partner Institute of Computational Biology in Shanghai.
“We now know every step in the processes that drive photosynthesis in C3 crop plants such as soybeans and C4 plants such as maize,” Long said. “We have unprecedented computational resources that allow us to model every stage of photosynthesis and determine where the bottlenecks are, and advances in genetic engineering will help us augment or circumvent those steps that impede efficiency.”
Substantial progress has already been made in the lab and in computer models of photosynthesis, Long said.
“Our lab and others have put a gene from cyanobacteria into crop plants and found that it boosts the photosynthetic rate by 30 percent,” he said.
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While many scientific, political and regulatory hurdles remain for plants engineered to do a better job of converting the sun’s energy into biomass, the work should be undertaken now, Long said.
“If we have a success today, it won’t appear in farmers’ fields for 15 years at the very earliest,” he said. “We have to be doing today what we may need in 30 years.”
Read full, original article: Report: Photosynthesis hack needed to feed the world by 2050
