Bacteria to Help Produce Water and Nitrogen Use Efficient Plants

Cyanobacteria, often referred to as blue green algae, may help produce transgenic plants that use water and nitrogen more efficiently. Cyanobacteria possess active uptake systems for the acquisition of carbon dioxide (CO2) that are notably absent in many plants. These CO2-concentrating mechanisms (CCM) may help increase photosynthetic efficiency of plants, especially those that follow the C3 pathway, reports the group of G. Dean Price at the Australian National University.

Price and colleagues discussed some prospects for introducing cyanobacterial CCM components into C3 plants. Their paper, published in the Journal of Experimental Botany, indicates that among the possible approaches that target plant chloroplasts include the expression of a cyanobacterial transporter and the establishment of a more elaborate form of the cyanobacterial CCM in the organelle.

There has been considerable interest in the objective of moving significant parts of the C4 cycle into C3 plants, however, moving parts of the cyanobacterial CCM into C3 plants has received little attention, wrote the researchers. C4 plants follow a more complex but efficient carbon fixation strategy than C3 plants. C4 plants, such as maize and sugarcane, have a competitive advantage over C3 plants in cases of drought, high temperatures and nitrogen or carbon dioxide limitation.

The journal article can be accessed by subscribers at http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/erm112v2.