‘Hot potato’ plants engineered to flourish in heat waves
When a scorching heat wave struck Illinois in June 2022, crop physiologist Katherine Meacham-Hensold hoped her team's new bioengineered potato variety would survive it-but she was astonished by just how well it thrived. The plant yielded 30 percent more of its large red tubers than a normal, unengineered plant in the same conditions, according to a recent study in Global Change Biology.
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To engineer the potato, Meacham-Hensold and her colleagues at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign focused on an inconvenient heat-triggered process in most plants called photorespiration, in which a key photosynthesis enzyme known as RuBisCO gets sidetracked and begins making a toxic by-product. RuBisCO molecules need to bind to carbon dioxide to carry out photosynthesis, but about a quarter of the time they grab oxygen instead-and this erroneous process happens more often at high temperatures. This inefficiency can decrease crop yields by as much as 50 percent.
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In the new engineered potatoes, a gene inserted into the plant cell's nucleus produced a protein that traveled into the chloroplast, the cell organelle used in photosynthesis. There it broke down the toxic by-product, so the chloroplast didn't need to send it out to other organelles. This saved energy, similar to how eating local food saves the energy of trucking it across the country.
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The new technique could help crops adapt to climate change. Similar strategies have been used previously in rice, but this study is the first to show that it doesn't cause a decrease in a food crop's nutritional quality, Meacham Hensold says: the team froze and ground up the tubers to measure their starch, fiber, sugars, protein, calcium, potassium, iron, and vitamins B6 and C.
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