Accelerating Photosynthesis

This is not correct: &quot;Food is created by taking CO2, keeping the C and releasing the O2.&quot;<p>The resulting O2 actually comes from a pair of H2O.<p>Consider the reaction performed by purple sulfur bacteria, which are related by evolution but have a slightly different reaction. It is this:<p>CO2 + 2 H2S gives [CH2O] + H2O + 2 S<p>There, carbon dioxide reacts with hydrogen sulfide to give water, sulfur, and part of a carbohydrate.<p>Photosynthesis in plants is the same sort of reaction, but the situation is less obvious because there is H2O on both sides of the reaction. We&#x27;ve proven what happens by experiments with radioisotopes.<p>The entire photosynthesis reaction consumes 6 CO2 and 12 H2O to produce 6 H2O, 6 O2, and a sugar.<p>From the 12 H2O, half of the H goes to the sugar and the other half goes to producing new H2O.<p>From the 12 H2O, all of the O goes to producing O2.<p>From the 6 CO2, half of the O goes to the sugar and the other half goes to producing new H2O.<p>From the 6 CO2, all of the C goes to producing sugar.

Photosynthesis is a strange beast...<p>You know the cliché that something designed by evolution, or &quot;natural&quot;, is usually pretty efficient, sort-of &quot;in sync&quot; with its surroundings, etc. For many things this subjectively holds true, with things like Spider silk, flight of large birds, a diving penguin, etc.<p>Photosynthesis, and the core protein, Rubisco, is anything but! It&#x27;s <i>the</i> central protein of live on earth, and yet... it&#x27;s a totally ridiculous machine.<p>You ever wonder what the inside of a typical cell sounds? In a cartoon it would be a high-pitched whining, because that correlates well with the typical speed at which some protein does its business when busy.<p>Rubisco is the fat guy lazily picking up the hammer every once in a while, balancing it in the air, slamming it down and...missing 2&#x2F;3 the time.<p>So this idea does have potential. Unfortunately, the plant biophysics have been well understood for a few decades, and the idea isn&#x27;t new or anything.<p>I&#x27;d say the even-odds of doubling the CO_2 fixation of some plant we can grow on a large scale is about 20%.<p>It is completely irresponsible to let this, and other such schemes, inform policy wrt climate change right now. Invest in research, yes. But using it to put of necessary changes is just motivated reasoning an will end with nothern russia looking like Florida, and Florida looking like what&#x27;s 30km east of Florida now.

The lack of authorship attribution or institutional affiliation is quite strange in this piece. Apparently a lot of effort was undertaken to write the software or at least to write the article. &quot;We&quot; and &quot;our&quot; appear in nearly every sentence. Who are &quot;we&quot;?<p>The ideas in there are quite interesting to think about. I&#x27;m glad I read it, but questions like this are unsettling given the lack of expressed ownership:<p>&quot;Why bother with environmental control and especially environmental optimization when the goal is accelerating photosynthesis genomically?&quot;

Plants have had billions of years to evolve on Earth, if there were a more efficient way to photosynthesize, wouldn’t it have emerged by now through natural selection?<p>For instance, I would imagine that competition in the Amazon amongst plants is high enough to have driven a photosynthesis efficiency arms race. Do different plants differ significantly in their photosynthesis efficiency? If so I would study the genomes of plants in the Amazon, or similarly competitive environments.

Something I haven&#x27;t seen mentioned much is the recent progress in single atom catalysts[1], which is a really cool idea. These seem able to convert CO2 to CO in high yield. This could be one way to start pulling a lot of CO2 out of the air efficiently. CO can then be used fro many chemical processes whether just sequestering carbon or otherwise.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedaily.com&#x2F;releases&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;180301094857.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedaily.com&#x2F;releases&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;180301094857.h...</a>

Neat site, but it would be good to have some information on who created it, who did this research, and who (if anyone) funded it.

Very clear explanation, love the diagrams.<p>To me this is a more sensible way than carbon tax, or even better use carbon tax to fund research like this.<p>I don&#x27;t think that economic incentives alone might fix the situation, and maybe not even slow it down sufficiently. We need political focus, and high investment in research.

Can&#x27;t wait for a superplant to take over all ecosystems on earth! Hoping it&#x27;s tasty at least.

Aren&#x27;t phytoplankton the biggest producers of oxygen? They also reproduce a lot faster than land based plants and would be easier to work with and iterate on. Why aren&#x27;t they mentioned in this article?

I&#x27;ve always wondered if humans could create synthetic photosynthesis factories. Skip all the biological steps of creating cell walls and an immune system and just create sugars from light and CO2. I would imagine this technology would be especially valuable for space exploration. The whole plot of The Martian would disappear if Mark Watney had a carbohydrate machine.

Beautiful work in automating the experiments and increasing the throughput, very innovative approach.

&quot;Add Green &amp; Infrared Antennae Proteins&quot; =&gt; Nature will become sad to watch

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Food_forest" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Food_forest</a><p>&gt; Forest gardening is a low-maintenance, sustainable, plant-based food production and agroforestry system based on woodland ecosystems, incorporating fruit and nut trees, shrubs, herbs, vines and perennial vegetables which have yields directly useful to humans. Making use of companion planting, these can be intermixed to grow in a succession of layers to build a woodland habitat.

&gt; We are building a pipeline from FASTA files of genomes to deployment in our customer&#x27;s facilities.<p>This statement and the remainder of that paragraph is simply nonsense. The same can be said for much of the rest of the text. They are trying to resuscitate an old idea with pure hype.

I like the totally novel angle of attack on the CO2 problem!

Why forest can&#x27;t be farms? They should not be opposite but complement each other.

why do i feel like i&#x27;m in the first part of a scifi movie that ends up in the destruction of all life on the planet due to &quot;clever&quot; science

Still no photosynthesis for humans... :(