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from the make-hay-while-the-sun-shines dept.
Scientists affiliated with the RIPE (Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency) Project at the University of Illinois and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service report that they have been able to increase photosynthetic efficiency in genetically engineered tobacco plants by 40% over normal tobacco plants.
They did this by working around a well known problem in many types of plants. Instead of only taking in CO2, the main enzyme involved, rubisco, also can bind oxygen. This not only doesn't produce the usual carbohydrate that is the base of the food chain, it creates toxic side products that the plants have to spend energy to break down into safe forms.
The key thing they show is that they can do this not in the laboratory, but in ordinary fields here in Central Illinois. Tobacco is a common "lab rat" plant, so it's not about the tobacco industry. Many of our biggest crops (so called C3 plants) waste energy this way. If they can do it for tobacco, they probably can do this for other plants as well.
PhysOrg: https://phys.org/news/2019-01-scientists-shortcut-photosynthetic-glitch-boost.html
Original Science Paper (may be paywalled): http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6422/eaat9077
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday January 09 2019, @05:24PM
Okay, boost the efficiency of photosythesis, wonderful- - sounds like an unmitigated win for agriculture, right?
But what of the unintended consequences?
First there's the obvious - what is the nutrition and toxicity profile of the new chemical pathway they've created - i.e. will eating the new leaves, saturated with new bio-chemicals, cause health problems for animals (or even more importantly, the bacteria, fungi, etc. that our ecosystem is built on)
Second there's the invasive organism potential - a 40% increase in photosynthesis efficiency is going to give a plant a massive survival and competition advantage, likely enough to choke out a whole lot of competing plants. That's almost always a bad thing for the ecology.
Then there's the larger part of that problem - crossbreeding. Replacing part of something as integral as the photosynthesis pathway might be a big enough change to make wild hybrids un-viable, in which case no problem. Plants though tend to have massively redundant genomes, so there's a fair chance that hybrids may inherit both full pathways - in which case they and ~1/2 of their offspring (with other hybrids) will likely get a still-substantial advantage, while another 1/4 of their offspring will get the full new pathway.
As much as I love the idea on the surface, this is one of the nightmare scenarios for GMOs running amok.