Making Rice More Adapted to High CO₂ Concentration

With the challenge of climate change and need for increased food production, research focus is now on the improvement of rice that would produce high yield at high CO₂ concentration. One of the initiatives is the C₄ Rice Consortium that involves 12 partner institutions across four continents and is led by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. Dr. Julian Hibberd's team at Cambridge University has been cloning genes required for the biochemical reactions, and transgenic strains of rice that express them are being grown at IRRI. Other groups are looking for C₄ mutants that have lost their leaf anatomy, and C₃ mutants that have developed it; and a vast gene sequencing screen is searching for new C₄ genes.

A new initiative led by Professor Howard Griffiths will explore the improvement of photosynthetic yields. The research project was awarded a support grant from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the US National Science Foundation.

Prof. Griffith explained that the research work will focus on the presence of pyrenoid which was found to make the RuBisCO enzyme in the algae to work at a lower levels of CO₂ in submerged conditions. The work will then focus on Chlamydomonas for the presence of pyrenoid. "The findings will have direct application for improving algal bioenergy productivity, as well as potential implications for transforming higher plant crop yields by emulating the carbon-concentrating mechanism in every photosynthetically active cell of the plant," Griffith added.

The research news can be found at http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/turbocharging-a-new-green-revolution/