The research—conducted at the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge, and led by Dr. Pallavi Singh, currently at the University of Essex's School of Life Sciences—focused on photosynthesis, which is one of the most complicated and important processes that plants use to turn light, carbon dioxide, and water into sugars that fuel life on Earth.
There are two kinds of photosynthesis: C3 and C4. Most food crops—such as rice, wheat, barley and oats—depend on the less efficient C3 photosynthesis, where carbon is fixed into sugar inside cells called 'mesophyll' where oxygen is abundant. However, oxygen can hamper photosynthesis. C4 crops—such as maize, sugarcane, sorghum and millets—have evolved specialized 'bundle sheath' cells to concentrate carbon dioxide, which makes C4 photosynthesis as much as 60 percent more efficient, particularly in hot and dry environments.
Due to the global rise in temperatures, C3 plants are growing in regions which are often hot and dry, meaning they could benefit from the energy-saving mechanisms of C4 photosynthesis. However, C4 photosynthesis is very complex, poorly understood, and has only been investigated mainly on a gene-by-gene basis to see if its mechanism can be used to improve productivity of C3 crops.
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