International Sugar Journal

Bioengineering photoreception regulation improves soybeans photosynthesis and crop yields [Full subscriber]

RIPE researchers have shown that bioengineering soybean plants to improve regulation of photoprotection – a natural process that enables plants to cope with damaging excess absorbed light energy in full sunlight – improved soybean seed yield by up to 33% in field trials.

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Boosting crop productivity by engineering the carbon-concentrating mechanism in the photosynthesis machinery [Full subscriber]

Researchers at Princeton University and Northwestern University provide a framework to boost crop growth by incorporating a strategy adopted from a fast-growing species of green algae. The algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii contain an organelle called the pyrenoid that speeds up the conversion of carbon, which the algae absorb from the air, into a form that the organisms can use for growth.

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Dynamic photosynthesis model simulates 10-20% yield increase in C4 crops [Full subscriber]

researchers from the University of Illinois have developed a model that treats photosynthesis as a dynamic process rather than an activity that either is or is not happening, allowing the group to examine the impacts of light fluctuations that crop leaves experience due to intermittent clouds, overlying leaves, and the sun’s daily passage across the sky.

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Engineering C3 plants with Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) photosynthesis to be resilient against drought conditions [Full subscriber]

In many places, climate change is expected to bring hotter, drier weather. In a recently published study in The Plant Cell by researchers from the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research and the University of Oxford, the potential for engineering drought-resistant plants via the introduction of Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) was analysed.

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Hacking photosynthesis increases crop yield by 27% [Registered]

Scientists from the University of Essex have resolved two major photosynthetic bottlenecks to boost plant productivity by 27% in real-world field conditions.

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Discovery of how plants avoid photodamage may lead to boosting crop yields [Full subscriber]

During photosynthesis, plants simultaneously achieve two seemingly opposite goals: they convert photoenergy to chemical energy with near unity quantum efficiency; and they safely expel excess light as heat to avoid photodamage. There has been much debate over the past several decades over how plants actually achieve this. Now, researchers from the Massachusettes Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US and the Universities of Pavia and Verona in Italy have revealed one of the possible mechanisms to achieve this feat.

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Next gen biotechnologies advanced by the discovery of a critical part of the photosynthetic machinery [Full subscriber]

Researchers from The University of Queensland (UQ) and the University of Münster (WWU) have purified and visualized the ‘Cyclic Electron Flow’ (CEF) supercomplex, a critical part of the photosynthetic machinery in all plants. The discovery could help guide the development of next-generation solar biotechnologies.

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Crop yields increased by 47% from stimulating photorespiration [Registered]

A new study led by researchers at the University of Essex has revealed that the output of major food crops could be increased by nearly 50% simply by boosting the production of a specific protein that is involved in photorespiration.

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CO2 fixing machinery in algae could help engineer faster-growing crops [Registered]

About half of the photosynthesis on Earth is performed in the ocean by single-celled algae. Many of these algae fix carbon dioxide more efficiently than land plants by concentrating most of their Rubisco into a microcompartment called a pyrenoid.

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Tweaking photosynthesis increases crop productivity by 20% [Registered]

Researchers have identified a way to manipulate photosynthesis in plants to increase their light-harvesting ability and with it, increase crop productivity by as much as 20%.

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