A team from the University of Illinois has developed a modeling framework connecting enzyme activity related to photosynthesis to yield. This is the first time a model has tied the dynamic photosynthetic pathways directly to crop growth.
"A previous model coupled data from the genetic, metabolic, and leaf levels, but we needed to connect the metabolic level to the greater canopy level," said Yufeng He, a postdoctoral researcher in the Matthews Group at Illinois. "The new model allows us to examine how changes in enzyme activities can affect yield by better connecting the environmental variation experienced by the crops in the field to the metabolic processes."
This work is part of Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), an international research project that is engineering crops to be more productive by improving photosynthesis, the natural process all plants use to convert sunlight into energy and yields.
In a recent study published in in silico Plants, He and others show how their model will positively impact the ability of scientists to accurately simulate crop growth. Previously, scientists wanting to simulate field experiments had to treat the process of photosynthesis, and the associated enzyme activities, as if the plant were in steady-state. For anyone who has been in a crop field, that is a very unrealistic measure.