A Postdoc looks to improve C4 crops

Roots & Shoots’ July Guest blogger: James Schnable, a Postdoctoral Associate in Dr. Tom Brutnell’s lab, Enterprise Rent-A-Car Institute for Renewable Fuels at the Danforth Center.

Oxygenic photosynthesis, a term consistently used by plant scientists, has been around for more than 3.4 billion years but C4 photosynthesis, a specific type of photosynthesis that the Brutnell lab focuses on has only been around for 25 million years.

Plants that are able to perform C4 photosynthesis are more productive, use less water and require less fertilizer under hot dry conditions. The Midwest drought in the summer of 2012 was devastating to crops. The severe weather highlighted how important it is for crops to make more efficient use of water with fewer inputs. Through C4 photosynthesis research, we at the Danforth Center seek to make existing C4 crop species, such as corn, sorghum, and sugarcane more efficient and to teach other crops how to use the C4 pathway to reduce the amount of water and fertilizer they require.

Evolution doesn’t create new systems out of thin air. Instead, a system like C4 photosynthesis is constructed out of building blocks co-opted from other biological processes already present within a plant.

Research conducted at the Enterprise Rent-A-Car Institute for Renewable Fuelsat the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center is focused on identifying the genes that have been co-opted for C4 photosynthesis. As C4 photosynthesis has arisen over 22 times independently in the grasses, comparative approaches between different species that evolved C4 photosynthesis independently and their relatives which remain non-C4 should allow us to identify the shared pivotal changes linked to the evolution of C4 photosynthesis. To make comparisons, a number of well-studied C4 crop species with sequenced genomes, such as maize, sorghum, and foxtail millet, are used as well as many wild grasses in the process of generating genome or transcriptome sequences.

To read the article in its entirety, click here.