Senior Lecturer University of Essex Colchester, England, United Kingdom
Adapting crops to warmer growing season temperatures is a major challenge in mitigating the impacts of climate change on crop production. While nearly all processes in plants are impacted by above optimum temperatures, the impact of heat stress on photosynthetic processes stand out for their centrality. Therefore, understanding and improving photosynthetic responses to changing environmental conditions is crucial in developing high-yielding resilient crops.
Most of the world’s crop species use C3 photosynthesis, for which increasing temperature means higher rates of photorespiration. In C3 crops like wheat, rice and soybean, photorespiration translates into large yield losses that are predicted to increase as global temperature warms. Engineering less energy-intensive alternative photorespiratory pathways into crop chloroplasts drives increases in C3 biomass production under agricultural field conditions, and we have demonstrated that this can also confer thermal protection under heat-stress in the field.
This talk will explore the response of the biochemistry of carbon assimilation to climate change, and provide an update on transgenic strategies that show promise in improving the high-temperature tolerance.