Meeting the Global Food Demand of the Future by Engineering Crop Photosynthesis and Yield Potential

Abstract

Increase in demand for our primary foodstuffs is outstripping increase in yields, an expanding gap that indicates large potential food shortages by mid-century. This comes at a time when yield improvements are slowing or stagnating as the approaches of the Green Revolution reach their biological limits. Photosynthesis, which has been improved little in crops and falls far short of its biological limit, emerges as the key remaining route to increase the genetic yield potential of our major crops. Thus, there is a timely need to accelerate our understanding of the photosynthetic process in crops to allow informed and guided improvements via in-silico-assisted genetic engineering. Potential and emerging approaches to improving crop photosynthetic efficiency are discussed, and the new tools needed to realize these changes are presented.

A chloroplast thylakoid lumen protein is required for proper photosynthetic acclimation of plants under fluctuating light environments

“…Plants have evolved physiological mechanisms enabling the photosynthetic apparatus to adapt to natural, everchanging light environments (1). Exploring regulatory mechanisms that ensure high photosynthetic efficiency and productivity under fluctuating light can contribute to sustainable agriculture at a time of changing climate and continuous population growth (2,3).…”

Photosynthesis Control: An underrated short-term regulatory mechanism essential for plant viability

“…It is estimated that manipulation of photoprotection may lead to up 30% gain of photosynthesis efficiency. 58 Together with the simultaneous improvements in the water and nitrogen use efficiency per unit of biomass in a relatively short time (5-10 year timescale), 58 photoprotection stands up as an ideal trait to be manipulated in the next coming second "Green Revolution. "…”

Systems Biology of the Fluxome

“…Multi-scale modeling is actively developed in microbiology, Mycoplasma genitalium [65] and plant biology, specifically for in silico approaches to improving photosynthetic efficiency [67,68]. In the Mycoplasma case, a bottom-up approach was adopted to simulate emergent phenotypes from individual molecules and their interactions.…”

“…In plants, computational models of shoot and root development, and canopy microclimate were integrated to account for interactions with the rest of the plant system or crop ecosystem. Many of these models have been used in isolation to predict synthetic and systems as a mean to improve photosynthetic efficiency ignoring, however, interactions with the rest of the plant system or crop ecosystem [68].…”

“…For example, the test of potentially new pathways of photosynthetic carbon metabolism to be engineered in crops for increasing photosynthetic efficiency was simulated and the impact on the complete photosynthetic system evaluated via an energy balance analysis [70]. This approach led to predict the strategy that would actually increase net photosynthetic efficiency [68].…”