INSTITUTE, W.Va. — Researchers at West Virginia State University (WVSU) are investigating the biochemical limitations of C3 crop photosynthesis, the process by which plants use sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to create oxygen and energy in the form of glucose. The work was published in the July edition of Frontiers in Plant Science, the world’s most-cited peer-reviewed plant science journal.
C3 crops are plants that utilize the standard photosynthetic pathway, making up the vast majority of agricultural crops.
“Photosynthesis is fundamental to global food security, but carbon assimilation efficiency remains significantly below its theoretical maximum,” said Dr. Sanju Sanjaya, director of the WVSU Energy and Environmental Science Institute, who led the project alongside postdoctoral researchers Shivasharanappa Patil and Bagyalakshmi Muthan. “Increasing photosynthetic carbon assimilation has direct implications for crop productivity, resource-use efficiency, nutritional security and climate resilience in the face of rapidly changing environmental conditions.”
The work points to three principal biochemical processes that limit photosynthetic performance: ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (Rubisco) catalytic activity, ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate regeneration via the Calvin-Benson-Bassham cycle, and triose-phosphate utilization for sucrose and starch biosynthesis.
“These constraints, which vary across environmental conditions, are closely linked through carbon metabolism, energy supply and source–sink regulation,” Sanjaya said. “Recent advances in plant physiology, molecular genetics and synthetic biology have identified new opportunities to address these limitations.”
Sanjaya and his team synthesized recent progress in understanding these three biochemical constraints and evaluated strategies to address them through coordinated genetic and metabolic engineering.
The team’s findings demonstrate that photosynthetic efficiency is governed by a highly integrated, dynamic network and future gains in photosynthetic performance will likely depend not on the optimization of a single component, but rather on coordinated, multi-target engineering strategies that simultaneously address interconnected biochemical and physiological limitations.
The full study is available online.
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