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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: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:01AM
Or, as is quite often the case in evolution, it gets stuck in a local maximum, where any mutation would reduce efficiency, and thus be bred out of the population. It's like trying to climb a mountain when you can only move upwards - it works great for a while, but eventually you're going to reach a smaller peak and have to cross a valley to keep climbing the mountain. Blind trial and error just doesn't have the intelligence or perspective to hike down through the valley so that it can get back to climbing the mountain again.
One of the strongest argument against Intelligent Design is that you see these sort of local-maximum dead-ends *everywhere* in biology. An Intelligent Designer would have done a much better job - heck, now that we have the tools and are starting to understand the language, even our own limited intelligence is able to make dramatic improvements.