Crops modified to make photosynthesis more efficient could enable low-income countries to grow more food on less land, boosting farmers’ incomes and preventing deforestation
because they adapt better to changes from sun to shade, and vice versa. When a leaf is in full sunshine, it absorbs more light energy than its photosynthetic machinery can handle. This damages cells unless they turn on a mechanism known as quenching to dissipate the excess energy.
When a leaf is shaded, however, quenching has to be turned off to avoid dissipating energy that could be used. Most crop plants turn quenching on and off rather slowly, and lose a lot of energy as a result. It isn’t certain why this is, says Long, but it could be because the wild ancestors of many crops grew in semi-arid conditions with few plants close to them. Now they are grown very closely together, and as the sun moves through the sky, most leaves continually have the shadows of other leaves moving over them.
Some wild plants, such as ferns, do turn quenching on or off much more rapidly, says Long. His team has added extra copies of three genes involved in the quenching process to the soybeans, which results in higher levels of the encoded proteins and speeds up the transitions, making“Although we don’t fertilise our soybean crops, the protein content was unchanged,” says Long.
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