

Crops such as rice, wheat and soybeans, as well as fruits and vegetables have a naturally occurring "glitch" in the way they photosynthesize that causes the plants to use up energy and resources, drastically suppressing productivity.

"The annual loss in production from wheat and soybean in Midwestern United States... is enough to feed roughly 200 million more people from this area alone," Paul South, a molecular biologist and lead author, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Scientists from the University of Illinois and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agriculture Research Service changed how tobacco plants with the same glitch process sunlight, inserting genes from bacteria, green algae and other plants, they wrote in the journal Science.


Image: Science

In more than two years of field studies, the genetically engineered tobacco plants developed faster and put out more leaves and stems than plants that weren't modified, researchers said.

The photosynthesis process is "nearly identical in plants so we expect that benefits observed in tobacco will result in changes to food crops," said South.





"Well, we need more of everything. The population alone is almost inevitably going up to 10 billion and people are eating richer (diets)," said Timothy Searchinger, lecturer at Princeton University and senior fellow at the World Resources Institute.

So the latest findings provide "important, promising work as it may open up new ways to expand crop yields," Searchinger, who authored a recent report on sustainable food systems, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"Lots more work to be done... but glad the researchers have started focusing on some important C3 crops," he added.

The term "C3 crops" refer to most major food crops that uses the C3 photosynthesis process. Crops that use a different form of photosynthesis are maize, sugarcane and sorghum.

