The Genome Generation by Elizabeth Finkel

Author:Elizabeth Finkel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2011-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

Powered by solar energy, mesophyll cells capture CO2 and store it in the four-carbon chain, malate. Malate is ferried into bundle sheath cells where the CO2 is unpicked from the chain, raising the concentration ten-fold and turbo-charging the sugar-making Rubisco engine.

The successful C4 plants with their turbo-charged Rubisco engine are quite obvious today. Think: corn as high as an elephant’s eye, sugar cane or bulrush millet—12 weeks and you need a ladder to see over the top of it. King of the C4 plants is elephant grass, delivering 88 tons of dry biomass per hectare—three times the performance of wheat at its very best!21 But C4 plants can produce their largesse on relatively poor soils and use much less nitrogen and water than their C3 cousins.22 It’s no wonder C4 plants are commanding attention as a source of biofuels. But since 2008, another group has been eyeing C4 plants with a different goal in mind. Plant engineers funded with US$12 million from the Gates Foundation have set out to try and retrofit the C4 engine into rice. It was John Sheehy’s idea. The head of rice physiology at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in The Philippines saw yields bottoming out and new breeds of rice producing more ears than they could fill.23 It was time to try and boost the engine. To begin, Sheehy assembled a team of engineers. It wasn’t hard; they were a small, unfashionable group of academics from the UK, Germany, Canada, America and Australia, who all knew each other on a first name basis; all diehard aficionados of C4 photosynthesis.24 Robert Furbank was one of them. Besides being an incurable tinkerer, he is the director of a state-of-the-art facility that can measure the workings of the plant engine: the High Resolution Plant Phenomics Centre at CSIRO, Canberra, Australia. It is a facility that has taken ‘feel’ from being an art to a science.

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The plant engineers have the hubris to try their wild idea because of two new pieces of ‘omics’ technology. ‘Omics’ is a distinctly 21st century suffix. It means doing things en masse. Genomics enables researchers to quickly scan through lots of genomes. Phenomics allows them to scan the phenotype (the characteristics) of lots of individuals. Borlaug and Huerto, who felt-up hundreds of plants a day, almost qualified. In Furbank’s centre they scan thousands a day. But it’s not just about numbers. Phenomics also looks far more deeply into the inner workings of the plant. ‘Feel’ was about guessing what was going on in the plant from outward hints rather like a doctor guessing at what’s going on with the heart using a stethoscope. The modern day phenomics people have the equivalent of MRI and CAT scans.

Genomics combined with phenomics has empowered plant engineers to try and rebuild the plant photosynthesis engine. A genome provides the parts list of a plant. But on its own, a genome is not much good for redesigning the plant engine. Imagine receiving the parts list of a VW beetle.

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