Daring metabolic designs for enhanced plant carbon fixation

Increasing agricultural productivity is one of the major challenges our society faces. While multiple strategies to enhance plant carbon fixation have been suggested, and partially implemented, most of them are restricted to relatively simple modifications of endogenous metabolism, i.e., “low hanging fruit”. In this talk I aim to portray the next generation of metabolic solutions to increase carbon fixation rate and yield. These strategies involve major rewiring of central metabolism, including engineering photorespiration bypass routes that do not release carbon and supporting the Calvin Cycle by establishing a parallel carbon fixation route based on CO₂ reduction to formate. While the barriers for implementing these elaborated metabolic architectures are quite significant, if we truly want to revolutionize carbon fixation, only daring engineering efforts will lead the way.