The world's crop productivity is stagnating whereas population growth, rising affluence, and mandates for biofuels put increasing demands on agriculture. Meanwhile, demand for increasing cropland competes with equally crucial global sustainability and environmental protection needs. Addressing this looming agricultural crisis will be one of our greatest scientific challenges in the coming decades, and success will require substantial improvements at many levels. We assert that increasing the efficiency and productivity of photosynthesis in crop plants will be essential if this grand challenge is to be met. Here, we explore an array of prospective redesigns of plant systems at various scales, all aimed at increasing crop yields through improved photosynthetic efficiency and performance. Prospects range from straightforward alterations, already supported by preliminary evidence of feasibility, to substantial redesigns that are currently only conceptual, but that may be enabled by new developments in synthetic biology. Although some proposed redesigns are certain to face obstacles that will require alternate routes, the efforts should lead to new discoveries and technical advances with important impacts on the global problem of crop productivity and bioenergy production.light capture/conversion | carbon capture/conversion | smart canopy | enabling plant biotechnology tools | sustainable crop production Increasing demands for global food production over the next several decades portend a huge burden on the world's shrinking farmlands. Increasing global affluence, population growth, and demands for a bioeconomy (including livestock feed, bioenergy, chemical feedstocks, and biopharmaceuticals) will all require increased agricultural productivity, perhaps by as much as 60-120% over 2005 levels (e.g., refs. 1 and 2), putting increased productivity on a collision course with environmental and sustainability goals (3). The 45 y from 1960 to 2005 saw global food production grow ∼160%, mostly (135%) by improved production on

eThe metabolism of microalgae is so flexible that it is not an easy task to give a comprehensive description of the interplay between the various metabolic pathways. There are, however, constraints that govern central carbon metabolism in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii that are revealed by the compartmentalization and regulation of the pathways and their relation to key cellular processes such as cell motility, division, carbon uptake and partitioning, external and internal rhythms, and nutrient stress. Both photosynthetic and mitochondrial electron transfer provide energy for metabolic processes and how energy transfer impacts metabolism and vice versa is a means of exploring the regulation and function of these pathways. A key example is the specific chloroplast localization of glycolysis/gluconeogenesis and how it impacts the redox poise and ATP budget of the plastid in the dark. To compare starch and lipids as carbon reserves, their value can be calculated in terms of NAD(P)H and ATP. As microalgae are now considered a potential renewable feedstock, we examine current work on the subject and also explore the possibility of rerouting metabolism toward lipid production. Photosynthetic algae fix atmospheric carbon (CO 2 ) by using light energy to drive a series of chemical and redox reactions. This fixed carbon is transformed into reserve molecules that can be broken down at a later time to provide the cell with ATP, reducing power, and carbon skeletons. Starch, a polymer of glucose, is synthesized and degraded as a normal process in a light-dark cell cycle. Starch is also accumulated to prepare for gametogenesis, but it is not a prerequisite. The type and quantity of the reserve depend on environmental and cellular factors: stresses such as nutrient deprivation, salinity, temperature, and high light can be stimuli for starch accumulation and also for triacylglycerol (TAG) synthesis leading to lipid body accumulation in algae. Under nonstress conditions, starch would appear to be a preferential source of reserve in green algae as it is in plant leaves, whereas under stress conditions and in plant oil seeds, storage neutral lipids will accumulate to high levels.Photosynthesis is a tightly controlled process, from the capture of light energy to the conversion of this energy into ATP and reducing power (NADPH). ATP and NADPH feed the Calvin cycle, which is responsible for CO 2 fixation. In the absence of exogenous carbon supply, photosynthesis is the only source of energy, and CO 2 fixation provides carbon skeletons for all reactions in the cell. Tight control of the photosynthetic reactions is required to fit the downstream metabolic reactions in the chloroplast.We deliberately oriented our presentation and our choice of references toward Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a unicellular green alga that has garnered much attention from the scientific community, primarily because it is haploid and the genetics have been extensively developed, but it has also proven to be a robust model system for the study of photosynthesis. No...