Flash Science: Tanner Robison

um so photosynthesis seems like Alchemy plants take light and they they take air and they turn that into the sugars that drive all of life on Earth but there's a flaw at the heart of photosynthesis rubisco is the Protein that's responsible for taking CO2 out of the air and turning that into sugar um but rubisco can't tell the difference well it has a hard time telling the difference between oxygen and carbon dioxide and when rubisco reacts with oxygen inste of carbon dioxide the plant has to expend energy um in order to reverse that reaction um some plants have gotten around uh the limitations of rubisco by putting all of their rubisco into a special compartment and then uh they they concentrate CO2 into that compartment and this um you know reduces the likelihood that rubisco will react with oxygen and instead with CO2 um and this greatly enhances photosynthesis uh models estimate that by putting um this sort of structure into a crop plant you can increase yield by up to 40% um and Horn warts uh which is the organism that I study they're the only land plant to have um this kind of uh rubisco compartment um and they're you know they're kind of humble little plants and I think uh greatly overlooked and so the goal of my PhD was to study how they make these structures and how they can enhance their photosynthesis and uh to start we drew from algae because there this structure in Horn warts is a lot like a structure found in algae and in algae they have a special kind of linker protein that um it acts like a magnet for rubisco and it pulls all the rubisco together into one kind of one one place and so I went looking for a Linker like this this in Horn warts and I couldn't find anything um which was at first frustrating but then I took a closer look at the horn warts rubisco itself and I found that it has um like additional sequence at the end of the protein and it sort of looks like it hangs out of the protein like an arm um you know reaching out and when you cut that arm off and when I when I cut that arm off and fused it with a protein that lights up under a microscope you can see that just that arm part is enough to light up the the these structures in Horn warts and so this made us think that this this structure this uh extra arm is maybe what's responsible for forming these structures in Horn warts so when we took just this um horn wart rubisco and then expressed it we put it into a a plant which doesn't have this structure at all um it also formed um these structures so um we think what's happening is that the horn the the horn warts rubisco are kind of reaching out and they're they're grabbing their neighbors hand and they're um holding hands um and so we're excited about that great presentation is a hope that this could these lessons could be learned and applied to maybe crops or other applications to try to improve the yeah exactly yeah so yeah like I said um you know estimates are you know up to 40% increased yield if if we can integrate these structures into a crop plant so the the upside is is quite large I think yeah yeah this2 in the air keeps going up what kind of effect would that have wouldn't that help decrease productivity PL yeah I think it will yes um I think um these structures concentrate CO2 so much around rubisco like um I think 50 times atmospheric so the CO2 in the atmosphere would have to get quite high for this structure to like not be as advantageous yeah that's the that's the golden question no maybe I don't what certainly there is a reason reason but um I don't think we know that reason yet yeah

Channel: BTIScience

Views: 12

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Id: kZbfafhq5oE

Length: 4min 37sec (277 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2024