‘Improved photosynthesis can boost yield’

A team from the University of Illinois in the US has modelled improving photosynthesis through enzyme modification and simulated soya bean growth under realistic climate conditions. They aimed to determine to what extent the improvements in photosynthesis could result in increased yields, according to the ScienceDaily website.

Yufeng He, a postdoctoral researcher at the university, led this work for a research project called Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE).

“There’s a complex relationship between photosynthesis improvement and actual yield. Having higher photosynthesis doesn’t necessarily mean you have higher yield. The yield return is highly impacted by seasonal climate conditions. This study has created a bridge that links the missing part between photosynthesis improvements and higher yields at field scale,” he said. According to Science-Daily, RIPE was engineering crops to be more productive by improving photosynthesis.

The team used the BioCro modelling framework to simulate soya bean in fields under normal and elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) conditions, paying specific attention to two important parameters that affected the plant canopy’s photosynthetic process: Jmax and Vcmax. They wanted to determine the effect of boosting these photosynthetic processes at the canopy level, rather than just at the leaf level, and determine whether the effects could lead to higher yields under a range of climate conditions.

They found that the overall returns in plant photosynthesis and pod biomass (yields) were affected when plants were simulated in a high CO2 environment. They also determined that correlations between increased photosynthesis and increased yield were dependent on the climate conditions at different stages of soya bean growth. Megan Matthews, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Illinois and principal investigator on the research, said: “There has been evidence showing that photosynthesis can be improved by modifying certain enzymes, but most of these studies were either done only looking at the leaf-scale impacts or the impacts from a limited number of field trials and seasonal climate conditions. We studied the impacts of seasonal climate conditions at the field level on the improvements of photosynthesis. Using realistic climate inputs to run our models, we showed how those improvements would vary with different climates.”

The next steps for the researchers would involve adding specific data from African plant cultivars and environmental conditions and incorporating more detailed mechanistic models to apply the findings to crop growth in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Read the original article at bit.ly/42kVkZ7.