In Illinois, a state known for its agriculture, researchers have bioengineered soybeans with higher photosynthetic efficiency. Such a development could lead to increased crop production using fewer land resources, which may provide food security to the world’s poorest people.
Projections show that global food supply is not increasing fast enough to meet demand. “Getting more crop yield off of the same piece of land is so important,” says study author Stephen Long of the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “It means that, a) we’ve got insurance against further shortages of food, and b) if we don’t need that food, we can let the land go back to nature.”
Improving photosynthesis has been Long’s research focus for the past fifty years. The new soybean study builds off of a decade of work in which his team figured out how to optimize bottlenecks in the photosynthesis process...
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