This work looks “highly significant,” says Dean Price, whose
Coaxing bacterial genes to replace a notorious slowpoke of an enzyme in tobacco plants could be a step toward raising yields in food crops.
Biologists have grumbled for decades about the clunky pace and wasteful mistakes of the enzyme nicknamed Rubisco (for D-ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase). A version of the enzyme orchestrates a key step in capturing carbon dioxide from the air for photosynthetic organisms from pond scum to redwoods. A large group of green plants, including soybeans, rice and wheat, has some of the least efficient Rubisco of all, ultimately limiting their productivity.
A way to rev up Rubisco may be a step nearer, thanks to gene replacement engineered by researchers at Cornell University and Rothamsted Research in Harpenden, England. Genes for a peppier Rubisco, borrowed from a cyanobacterium, created working enzymes in laboratory tobacco, the researchers report September 17 in Nature. Tobacco served as a botanical lab rat, but researchers hope what they are learning will someday make food plants more efficient.
More work needs to be done before researchers can make plants thrive with borrowed Rubisco genes, says coauthor Maureen Hanson, a molecular geneticist at Cornell. Still, she’s pleased with demonstrating that the transplanted genes work. “If you can’t get this to work,” she says, “you have to give up on the whole project.”
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