New discovery will enhance yield and quality of cereal and bioenergy crops
A team of scientists led by Thomas Brutnell, Ph.D., director of the Enterprise Rent-A-Car Institute for Renewable Fuels at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center have developed a new way of identifying genes that are important for photosynthesis in maize, and in rice. Their research helps to prioritize candidate genes that can be used for crop improvement and revealed new pathways and information about how plants fix carbon. The findings, published in "Comparative analyses of C4 and C3 photosynthesis in developing leaves of maize and rice," on October 12, 2014 in Nature Biotechnology, also made public a mathematical model enabling access to datasets comparing C4 photosynthesis traits in plants like maize to C3 photosynthesis in plants like rice.