It's important to remember that alongside the issues described in this video, different types of plants use different pathways for photosynthesis: C3, C4, and CAM. These pathways are suitable for different environments, situations, and nutrient profiles. eg: CAM is optimized for hotter environments, there's evidence that C3 plants require excessive amounts of soil potassium to function properly when there's 575 PPM or greater atmospheric CO2, etc. etc. etc.
this is what I was thinking, C4 and CAM plants developed other strategies to bypass Rubisco's unspecific intake (meaning that by these strategies Rubisco doesn’t take O2 at all)
As a layman, I suspected plants might have found a work around considering the range of climates they live in today and in the past. It sounds a bit sensationalist to me.
@@Pid75 A "workaround" in evolutionary terms can easily mean mass die-offs, with only a small percentage of the planet's life surviving and very slowly proliferating as a result. And it's no different with C3, C4, and CAM plants, as the history of their individual rises and falls demonstrate.
@@Pid75 The flaws in the system discussed in the video ABSOLUTELY DO apply to a large majority of plants. The "workaround" in question does not exist in C3 plants, which work entirely on "Just have enough chloroplasts going, and surely a few of them will get some work done". This means that entire families of plants cannot stand high heat conditions, for example. The entirety of legumes and most deciduous trees are examples of C3 plants. Because of this, all of these plants are potential models to target RuBisCO, as well. It's a shame he didn't mention these alternate metabolic strategies, but only some plants use them.
An important thing to note however is that while C4 and CAM bypass the RubisCO problem, the way they do it costs more energy than a simple C3 RubisCO-carbon pathway... Hence why not everyone uses it.
This project would potentially be catastrophic for the natural world where the RuBisCO enzyme is fundamentally less efficient. Modified plants with better photosynthesizing capabilities would easily outcompete the native plants. We already know what havoc an invasive species can do to an ecosystem, let alone a super plant/gene would have on the world. This can only be done in very controlled environments such as lab grown food or well controlled industrial applications.
Plants also require a certain amount of water, nitrogen, phosphorus and other minerals to survive and are limited by those. Most invasive species simply produce a lot of viable seeds and many fix their own nitrogen, but our crops have very low germination rates, require special attention to reach seedling stages typically and require an unnatural amount of fertilizers. When you consider that nitrogen is typically the limiting factor to a plants growth, I see this having little to no ability to produce invasive plants species. In fact, even if we produced highly efficient RuBisCO enzymes and engineered plants to perfectly fix nitrogen, I doubt those plants would take over because being plentiful and edible makes you predated on more, especially when your seeds have had human aid for their sowing for thousands of years.
@@bmanpura Kinda a dumb argument given that any modification to any protein is possible given the variation in mutations that occur with every successive generation. You may as well be against selective breeding for the exact reason, except you have even less of a clue of what the outcomes will be in that case because it's random instead of artificial.
crucial in tropical, hot climates. consider that leaves are mostly green because it wants to reject/reflect the most energetic part of the sunlight's spectrum.
If that were true, then hard shade understory plants would be purple. Modern plants are green because chlorophyll was not the first photosynthetic kid on the block. The water splitting cyanobacteria were late to the sunlight game, and all the good frequencies (green) were already monopolized by bacteriorhodopsin armed archaea and bacteria.
@@wolvenedge6214 Possibly in some far distant future of biotech. The Archaea and some bacteria that use this form of phototrophy don't use it to fix CO2 and create reducing power. They use it to create a proton gradient across a membrane and run ATP Synthase directly. Kinda like a solar powered mitochondrion. When they evolved this there was no free oxygen on Earth, so reducing power wasn't needed.
@@NullHand Yes but the bacteria do this because they just use the ATP directly. Plants need to undergo the calvin cycle in order to turn the ATP and NADPH produced in the light-independent reactions into Glucose, which can be stored for longer than ATP and easily transported through the Phloem from sugar sources to sinks.
The biggest dilemma is that CO2 at 0.04% in the atmosphere is way lower than the 70% when photosynthesis first started billions of years ago. Nature has increased the synthesis of RuBisCo and evolved various carbon concentrating methods to balance this out and still make lots of product from minimal reactants. It may be a better conservation strategy to limit methane in the atmosphere and actively extract water vapour by using wind power.
Right, Strictly concerning plants and photosynthesis increased Co2 levels are purely a benefit. Idk why people feel the need to lie about this. We just can't have nuance I suppose. Co2 bad!!
You mean when 99% of our current plant species didn’t exist and the world was dominated by cyanobacteria that live in the ocean not in the ambient climate…. Right, maybe rethink this one.
@@JKenny44 Heat stress is not a benefit, you and the other misinformation guru are describing life in the boring billion, which was incompatible with human life.
@@lewis7242 Well the plants have done pretty well these past 2-3 billion years being on the land so I think we will be okay. Plus we have things like the svalbard seed vault to preserve species if need be.
1) rubisco is good enough for survival 2) any change to rubisco's amino acid pattern (a mutation) is more likely to result in an enzyme that doesn't function at all, rather than one that functions better.
I recommend checking out Arnold Bloom’s research on this. In short, he makes the case that photorespiration is advantageous for nitrogen absorption. It’s a tad controversial but definitely an interesting idea.
Fun fact: if photosynthesis was just a few % more efficient, it would become possible for humans to survive solely off of it. In fact, it's already theoretically possible using rates accessible by algae, if ideal conditions are provided. Energy is ultimately a numbers game, and as it turns out sunlight has a LOT of energy in it, even when most of it is wasted. EDIT: Another fun fact is that we already have the capability of converting sunlight into something useful with melanin standing in for chlorophyll, and it's actually more effective at its job than chlorophyll due to capturing all of the colors instead of rejecting green, the only problem is that it's only capable of making Vitamin D instead of making the sugars and oxygen needed to sustain animal life.
Ummm. Melanin is not involved in a constructive way in the creation of Vitamin D. That happens non-enzymaticaly by UV directly striking and breaking one of the rings in 7-dehydrocholesterol. Melanin in humans is basically sunblock, simply absorbing UV and converting it to heat before it can mutate DNA by dimerization. Levels of skin pigmentation basically try to tune the balance between letting enough UV in to avoid ricketts while not killing the largest organ of your body with radiation damage from the excess. Tropical UV levels demand more screening than temperate. Summer demands more than winter.
Gonna need a source. Given that all the calculations of how much an energy a mammal would get from photosynthsis that I've ever seen aren't even close to filling caloric needs. There's a *huge* difference between trying to sustain a cold blooded vs a warm blooded animal with photosynthesis.
You need like a thousand square meters of land to produce enough food to sustain a human with a vegan diet and under ideal growing conditions. Yet it is supposed to be possible with like 2 square meters of skin of which at most half can face the sun at a time?
@@noergelstein tbf part of that is because we are intensly wastefull eaters who only eat the seeds on a plant, but even if we were capable of eating bamboo I don't think a single person has the surface area to use the energy available from sunlight.
@@noergelstein That thousand square meters of land isn't supporting one person, it's usually supporting a city or town of people. It also goes into inefficient practices such as growing animals, as well as producing bio-fuel so not all of it is feeding people. Run the numbers yourself if you don't believe me, you'll find that just a few % in efficiency makes all the difference in the world. I did the math because I was making a mod for a game with really annoying hunger mechanics and ended up having to nerf it twice because it was too strong.
Both dry ethanol and dry acetone should work for "the special chemical" in the rbscCO precipitation mentioned. Usually 2:1, dessicative precipitation. 🥰
This feels like the biology equivalent of room temperature superconductors: Would be awesome if someone figured it out, and we're getting closer, but it's taken decades and at this point your peers will look at you funny for working on it.
meh not really at all. Room temperature superconductor would require finding an entirely undiscovered physics phenomenon. Whereas using bacteria to randomly mutate rubisco until a better one is inevitably found is just how all incremental improvement has ever worked.
@@lemonke8132 From a purely scientific perspective, you're right. I'm referring more to the culture in academia surrounding those who work on the two issues.
RuBiSCO also evolved for cyanobacteria originally--critters that have these specific structures called carboxysomes that concentrate CO2 enough to help the enzyme work better. Genuinely wild seeing other folks out here talking about RuBisCO.
Alsl at some point, when the ideal conditions are met, the photosynthesis is delayed by the lack of CO2 in the air, that's why some greenhouses burn gas to make more CO2.
It's worse than lack of CO2...every 88 years or so, our Sun gets a bit 'special' Gliesberg cycle it's called...a periodic shift in the solar spectrum. For about 5-8 years, plants on Earth will tend to 'bolt'...the same thing happens when you plant seeds late in the season. Plants 'know' the seasons by the color of Sunlight...bluer during Summer, redder during Fall and Winter. During a cycle, the Sun stays in 'Fall red' for the entire year. Last time we saw a cycle was 1938...things were getting interesting all over. Count backwards by 88 from there...1850, 1762, 1674, 1586. It's not an exact match, but damn...world events and Gleisberg line up pretty darn well. "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times" Four human generations...88 years...the cycle has come by so often, it shows up in literature.
Greenhouses add more co2 for the plants when they can make sure the inside is cool enough for the plants to metabolize it. In general, plants metabolize co2 slower when they are over their preferred temperature range. An air conditioned greenhouse can handle more co2, those in the gradually heating up wild cannot.
@@coreytran7415Well yeah right now there's too much of it and the excess heat and unpredictable climate are hindering plant growth. What was your point again?
Maybe it's as efficient as it needs to be to maintain equilibrium with atmospheric O2/CO2? Also, your graphic had mushrooms growing from the RuBisCo molecule. Fungi aren't plants and are an entirely different kingdom that does not produce RuBisCo.
@@cris-kp2ge As far as plants are concerned, CO2 content needs to increase 100x because right now they're basically suffocating, and the entire reason they're still alive is because they can live at extremely low metabolic rates and their body is 90% lungs.
@@michaelbuckers Plants are not suffocating, RuBisCO is suffocating. Plants are more complex than RuBisCO. When you increase atmospheric CO2, RuBisCO is happy, but plants begin to suffer from heat stress and increasing damage from parasites and pathogens. Worsening floods and droughts do not help the situation either. Earth's current plant species have evolved to thrive in Earth's current conditions, minus the effect of humans. Drastically altering those conditions will not give you a good result.
@@cris-kp2ge No, plant and algal matter very regularly is buried and is not returned to the atmosphere unless we dig it up. That's how coal and oil is made.
Maybe the inefficiency of this protein works as a way for more biomass to be produced and consumed by animals? I doubt such inefficiency would be a net negative without being a positive elsewhere.
Unfortunately for the evolution "good enough" is often where the progress stops. There are plenty examples of simply bad evolutionary traits with no redeeming qualities. They are not evolved out of because better alternatives would at the start be worse before they surpass the existing option and thus loose evolutionary competition early on. It is a problem of local optimum also common in evolutionary machine learning: system reaches the closest high point of the function and stays there, even though there is a way better peak a few steps away - but to reach it the function has to go down first, and it is designed to always go up.
@@AtilaElari I can understand that, but countless of mutations and life competing would at least fix the issue for a few plants by now, at least those plants living with limited access to energy, such as those near the poles. So far that is not the case... I wonder why. But yes, it may just be bad luck, just as plants found out sexual reproduction way later than other organisms.
I feel like RuBisCO is like that coconut.jpg in the Team Fortress 2 game files. It got put in the code at the very beginning and somehow became a vital part of it, so now you just can't mess around with it or else everything breaks. Evolution has been forced to keep RuBisCO there in its current state even though it's inefficient and makes no sense. That means slight changes to the protein probably make it even worse at it's job. Its stuck in a potential well it can't escape without a big push, but natural evolution doesn't work that way. You'd probably have to do a major redesign all at once to improve it, not just slight incremental changes. But if humans CAN intentionally redesign it to be more efficient outside of the evolutionary pressures on plant survival and then stick it back into plants, it could radically change life on this planet.
So if RuBisCo is a protein and plants overproduce it because of its inefficiency, plants contain more protein than they would if RuBisCo was efficient. Isn’t that a good thing for human nutrition?
Probably more important for animal nutrition- we can make up the difference with meat, cows can’t. You are right in that the lower protein feed will be a likely issue
Greta video and topic! Kind of surprised that there is no mention of the evolution of RubisCO prior to land plans and the trade offs of photoinhibition. Phytoplankton and photosynthetic bacteria/archaea have been dealing with the toxicity of too much photosynthesis occurring for a larger period of evolutionary history. And it’s also a problem with other light capturing- carbon fixing systems. Also, there’s no point about the misconception that evolution is an optimization process. It’s not but that doesn’t mean that evolution results in tons of creative solutions. Lastly, I’ll say that I think that this research IS really neat and has the best application for solar cells that use synthetic photosynthesis to more efficiently and cheaply harness light, but I think it’s not as useful to try and make crops or other land plants of interest “more photosynthetically efficient” (because you also have to rework all the other biochemical pathways in the plants to deal with these major changes, oh and you don’t want any lab strains to be released into nature either).
one of the most impressively edited news outlets, yet so underrated and overlooked by the yt algorithm. such a damn shame less than one million people are seeing this
The rubisco enzyme is purposely inefficient as we depict it. The enzyme needs to work in strict contact with ferredoxin which can catalyse some dangerous reactions resulting in ROS that can kill the plant if RuBisCo incorporates more O2 than CO2. This can happen in a CO2-less or lightless ambient, in which the inefficacy of rubisco prevents the death of plants. So nature and evolution nailed it as the way it is, and we cannot do that better.
I'm astonished that scientists can be so blithe to fuck around with chemistry that took billions of years to evolve to its current state. Wouldn't it be wise to pause and ask WHY RuBisCo is so apparently "inefficient" and what role that inefficiency might play in both physiology and ecology? More importantly, ending world hunger (like climate change) is not really a science problem; it's a political problem. We could end world hunger with the technologies we already have; we just don't have the political will to do so.
I absolutely loved the science behind this and how it's explained to the viewers, but I think this topic deserves more depth and philosophic questions: how is it intended to be applied to crops? will it be another way for big companies such as Monsanto to get a monopol on agricultural resources around the world? is there an ecological risk despite absorbing more carbon from the atmosphere? Should we play with nature at this scale is another one but most importantly we should never reply "yes" without ever asking ourselves whys and hows
For C3 plants (like wheat and rice): the optimal temperature range for photosynthesis is between 20-30°C (68-86°F). For C4 plants (like maize and sugarcane), it is between 30-40°C (86-104°F) also stomatal closure happens at these higher temperatures, to keep in moisture. I was alway taught that plants don't really grow on very hot and sunny days, in any case these two effects happen at around the same temperatures and have. compounding effect. the world has been hot before, and this magical protein they are searching for never materialized despite countless mutations and literal eons of evolutionary pressure. so my bet Is that this is a fundamental limitation and will never be solved.
Actually there evolved at least two better photosynthesises in plants: C4 and CAM. Even though the last few million years saw record low carbon dioxide levels, these mechanisms are still only found in a limited number of species specialised for hot dry climates. On the other hand, it wasn’t really hot during that time.
You can literally see the "magical" superior protein in the video if you'd watch it, but you'd rather maintain ignorance and keep spouting fossil fuel talking points.
I am not sure the genes would spread that way. It might still be difficult for one species with the advantage, to take over a different evolutionary slot without millions of years of time or something.
@@colorado841 True, but if the situation gets dire enough we might have to consider spreading it to wild flora intentionally. A global bioengineering project should be a last resort, we don't know what the consequences would be, we should be focused on curbing emissions and holding corporations accountable, but it won't hurt to have a hail Mary in our back pocket.
@@colorado841however, if it gets into cyanobacteria populations, you might start to see horizontal gene transfer between many different unicellular photosynthesizing species
This concept is already in play with algaes and photosynthetic bacterias that we use for bio oils, except kinda the opposite effect from what you’re imagining. We can easily make these organisms super efficient mass producers in the lab. But when we put that plump little organism in a trough or stream outside they are candy to the rest of the food chain. The genetics die with that generation and they have to be reseeded in the lab because they can’t out reproduce their predation rate. A fundamental survival strategy is to *not* get fat and full of nutrients, because organisms like that are first in line to get eaten. We get around this with our crops by protecting them (kinda, you should see the damage one bear can do to a corn field or one goat to an alfalfa field or one pest to a crop without anti pest genes, etc), and natural “high yield” food plants thrive commonly by making their reproduction linked to their predation-like seeds being pooped around- or by protecting their storage like underground tubers or spikes or woody shells… all of those options present extra obstacles that eat up energy to harvest them. But the more nutritious it is, the more effort all of our competitors will make to eat it before we want to harvest it. It’ll be interesting to see how this tries to go forward.
This is honestly the best chance we have at becoming a type 1 civilization. I think the complex mechanisms of living things along with their ease of use make it perfect for gathering energy more cost effectively than Solar
Aren't there a few specific plants that use a different, more efficient process of photosynthesis? I'm pretty sure I heard something like that - does anyone know the plant's/process' name?
Ah, found a relevant video: "Fixing the flaw in Photosynthesis" by But Why?. The different processes are called C3 ("normal") photosynthesis and C4 photosynthesis. The latter occurs in some hot+arid-adapted plants.
There's a different type of photosynthesis called the C4 pathway. It basically prevents the binding of O2 with RuBisCO by increasing the amount of CO2 at the site of it's functionality.
Ok dumb question here but wouldn't the bacteria just develop resistance to PRK the same way they develp resistance against antibiotics like creating proteins that break down PRK or proteins that pumps out the toxic products or binds them away or turn them into less toxic metabolites?
Im no scientist, but it got me thinking that maybe Rubisco efficient plants wouldn't feel the need to grow as big as they are with the bad enzyme. Imagine they are ok and happy with just a couple of leaves instead of a giant canopy. And that would be great for the plants, but maybe not so great for the other organisms depending on it, including us. Just a thought. Perhaps that's not how it works at all.
It sure would be weird if the millions of square miles dedicated to monoculture farming thats almost entirely predicated on unsustainable groundwater or low efficiency irrigation had a negative effect on the environment.
There are more trees in the northern hemisphere today than there was 100 years ago. The Sahara desert has been shrinking. It's called greening because plants are reclaiming the desert. Higher CO2 concentrations are allowing plants to get the CO2 they need to survive while losing less water. 100,000 years ago Florida was under water due to higher global temperatures melting the poles. Humans reached North America 20,000 years ago when temperatures were much colder allowing them to cross lower sea levels using ice sheats. These nerds with their "save the world" experiments worry me more than climate change which has occurred throughout the history of the earth.
I'm totally about exploring technological options to expand energy efficiency in our food chains, but I'm super concerned about our food supply becoming more and more largely dependent upon patented foods rather than unpatented nature. Corporations will have an even greater chokehold on people.
This is the only type of genetic engineering that I have a problem with. Improving the photosynthetic ability of crops by a large margin is a very big very general advantage that is not specific to a farmland environment. Should this be done I fear a future where wild plants are outcompeted by a few handfuls of domestic plants. Vast open steppes of nothing but billowing grains and canola, deciduous forests of nothing but apple, cherry and almond trees, rainforests dominated by avocado and cocoa. Once that Pandora's box opens there would be a race against time to give the same advantage to all the wild plants if we were to want them to survive, but would we?
i feel like the best way to mitigate this is to only use these plants in hydroponic systems or make them not able to reproduce, though then that gets into planned obsolescence
@@justageekygamer Even if it was only legal to use them in hydroponics it's just a matter of time before they get out, and even if one make them unable to reproduce I feel that it is just a matter of time before some government somewhere would allow their farmers to grow these super-crops free of such impositions. If this rubisco engineering works out then I feel that we really need to start immediately figure out some mass distribution for these genes into wild plants, like crop dusting the jungle with retroviruses that just mass genetically modify all plant life. The consequences for life on earth would then still be entirely unforeseeable, it would by far make any Geoengineering project ever seriously proposed so far look mild in comparison.
@@Aurgelmir87well and it doesnt really matter at the end of the day is just another problem we can solve, what matters now is solving global warming then when we get that out of the way then we go from there
@@gamers-xh3uc This cure may very well be worse than the disease. Tbh I would rather we try the geoengineering projects like ocean fertilization or even atmosphere aerosol injection before contemplating this stuff which has the very real potential of changing the entire biosphere of planet earth.
@@Aurgelmir87Understandable concerns, but I’d argue that the scenario you described is extremely unlikely for most crops. Invasion ecology is complex. Higher growth rate does not necessarily equal enhanced fitness in a wild setting.
If Rubisco was called something dramatic like the “Gaia Molecule” or some sci-fi esque name, I’m pretty sure politicians would pick it up and be proponents for photosynthesis R&D. More efficient photosynthesis means more energy captured from our sun and retained on this world - more energy means more progress for us.
As if evolution worked like that. Just look at the human foot- it’s a terrible “design” but evolution goes with “good enough” not perfection. Or that fact that we evolved away from being able to make our own Vitamin C (other mammals can). Evolution is only about does it work enough to pass on genes. It’s a C student.
The world really isn't getting that much hotter, without dedicated teams of scientists, we wouldn't really notice. Besides, the greatest heat increases are coming from the urban heat island effect. Some plants grow in urban areas, but nothing critical...
3:17 nice try, guy. In the cretaceous average temperature and air oxygen content were both higher and plants are still here. They are gonna keep photosynthesizing as they did before
Yeah but the Cretaceous periods climate occurred overtime and a much more slower and natural pace. Climate change is happening rapidly, and so it may be harder for plants to adapt in time
I was under the impression that RuBisCO had been bypassed by Tobias Erb whom you cite I was also under the impression that the pathways to starch synthesis have been recently achieved The world should be jumping up and down and screaming for joy Can I assume that this means that farming can be bypassed and that the fundamental ingredients of human nutrition can be had by other means? I understand that electrochemistry applied to cyanobacteria canal produce abundant protein Seems like we’re in for some very interesting changes ahead !
Manny plants; like corn, rice, wheat and others, have already solved a great part of photorespiration (the enzyme’s mistake with O2) vía the C4 photosynthesis, there’s no need for this research, but for better regulation of industry emissions.
It's unknown if it's even possible for C3 plants to utilise the C4 pathway, so it's very important to invest in alternative pathways just in case there's a physiological constraint preventing the C4 pathway, and there's also the potential that they can be utilised together as the C4 pathway doesn't modify the Rubisco/RuBisCO itself, so if this research leads to better variants of Rubisco theoretically you can have the best of both worlds. And while yes we do need better regulations given that the majority of GHG emissions are by a handful of companies, more efficient Rubisco also allows for increased crop yields due to reduced energy wastage, so it's something to be pursed irrespective of climate concerns anyway.
because we only had selective breeding and our options to modify the plants was limited and less understood then. None of the modifications improved the ability to generate more energy, but simply decreased growth time, with the same energy produced, so of course past attempts yielded less nutritious results and overall poorer plant health.
@@sahildhama6315 you're missing the point. Growing faster =/= producing sugar faster. 1) Plants that have been bred to grow faster still use rubiscoso they are naturally limited by it. This means a plant that was bred for faster growth would be one that has more rubisco but less of other proteins which would produce nutrition, and would simply be inefficient faster. 2) Of course when you are planting and harvesting more plants that the land dries up quicker, that's more plants. 3) Them having shorter lifespans because they grow faster also means that they had less time in the soil to develop nutritional volume in the first place. ----- Replacing rubisco would be more akin to removing inefficiency because as the video describes, plants tend to have a lot of excess rubisco because they have evolved to run probability in parallel. If I wanted the result of 10 or higher on a ten-sided die, I could just roll 100 of those die. Replacing rubisco then would simply be increasing the number of faces on the die. If I wanted a result of >10 on a twenty-sided die, it would be a 55% chance as compared to a ten-sided's 10%.
This is so fascinating and inspiring for the future. I just hope that when this technology is ready for the market, society won't reject it just cause the innovation came from a lab...
If it ain't broke, don't fit it. Heat stress in plants is a farming practice issue, not global warming. This is just another handicap to poor farming practices. The chemical companies open their pockets up to the universities and get their support but roundup ready crops have some of the weakest genetics and lowest yields I seen in a real world setting.
@@k.h.6991 Light energy is used to split water into breathable oxygen, and electrons and protons - which are used to make NADPH and drive production of ATP, respectively; then those are used to make sugar from CO2 further down the line.
This technology could be as impactful as nuclear fission, and would need to be as carefully managed and regulated. The potential benefits of more efficiently growing food crops could be enormous. But the ecological damage that could be caused by species of plants with this fundamental improvement on photosynthesis escaping into the wild could be catastrophic.
@@azertyuiop432 AlphaFold3 has already done his job, predicting more than 200 million proteins, wich is around 98% of all proteins in existence. It might be usefull
Probably not. Alphafold2 guesses protein structure if you give it an amino acid sequence. It isn’t great at determining function and you can’t go backwards easily from function to structure to amino acid sequence.
Sorry while I am getting the point that we could improve performance of Photsynthesis. However saying that global warming might make Rubisco even do worse is a bit of a stretch. Climate is a multi factor system so let’s not use this as a buzzword. For such an important thing for life on earth, i think it deserves some respect and benefit of the doubt. Also, we all know that for eons, there were times that out climate was hotter SIGNIFICANTLY hotter than today if Rubisco is really doing a poor job we would not be here now. Alas, we’re here!! Thank God! 🙏🏻 this begs the question could there be reasons why Rubisco is what it is? I mean this isn’t the first that Nature taught us a thing or two. If we also follow evolution, then there should have been evolutionary pressure to optimize this and if it didn’t happen then there’s probably a good reason why it didn’t. While I ok with research for the sake of greater understanding let’s not get ahead of ourselves and call us masters of nature. This also means we should tread carefully about tinkering with Photosynthesis process.
Every time we try to outdo Nature, we end up knocking the finely tuned edge of balance that was shaped after a Billion years of life on Earth. I'm not so sure redesigning photosynthesis through a GMO could end well.
there's other bottlenecks in plant growth, like nitrogen and other compounds available in the soil, so a plant won't just grow faster if you improve 1 aspect, it will just hit another bottleneck faster. There's C4 photosynthesis already, which IIRC is a fix to the oxygen problem and with water management, and is found in hotter regions. Like 3% of plants but 5% of plant biomass uses it, and 25% of carbon capture, so despite capturing a lot, it only leads to a small biomass advantage. So it exists, and it naturally evolved, but it still takes time to spread in places where other aspects matter more than photosynthetic efficiency.
Something's up with the eq on ur audio....needs a cut in the bottom end. Way too much low bass going on. Sounds great off a phone speaker obvs, on headphones people would maybe say rich, but on a TV system it's boxy and boomy as hell. I just turned bass to min and now it's terrible and boxy because modern music/tv/blend technology is crap but that's another story😂. I know RUclips audio is a minefield of "experts" and people overthinking it when literally any mic is good enough and 90% of people are watching on phones anyway but yeah.. your content is high end, shame to have it sound bad even if it's for a minority. Just A B your audio with a few randomly selected half decent channels if you need a reference or just cut the low bass on your vocal track Edit: it's the voiceover track. Sort the mic placement or just eq it. Check the difference between that and the location audio of the producer 👊🙏
Do you think if plants were more efficient they would evolve to be inedible, or even actively deadly to us like mould, something that completely changes the current dynamic?
Do you think plants would even evolve if we had hyper-efficient photosynthetic bacteria? Is the deficiency caused by the over-efficiency of simply evolving ways to kill competitors rather than to update the process of production?
Exactly, people are so brainwashed it's scary, Co2 is a good thing, we could have 20x the Co2 levels that we have today and everything would be perfectly fine, better even.
@@JKenny44 no you wouldn't, you would get a bad headache at worst but only because you're not adapted to it yet. Current atmospheric Co2 concentration is 400/450ppm, it used to be at 8,000ppm over time that has oscillated on a downward trend, during the last ice age (10,000 years ago) the Co2 levels dropped so low (150ppm) that plants (especially fruiting plants) couldn't photosynthesise properly. You need Co2 ppm as high as 10,000+ more like 50,000 for it to cut off oxygen supply in the blood. We're never gonna release enough Co2 to do that, not even close. We're talking increases of a couple hundred ppm, which would benefit nature and our farms. Co2 and heat are not responsible for this mass extinction event, chemical and plastic pollution, sewage and farmland mismanagement etc, cities, factories and war goblins are responsible. "Green energy" is responsible. It's all a scam, don't recycle, incinerate it, don't pass that plastic onto to the next generation. The biomass of the planet is going up but the species diversity is going down, more biomass means more food and habitat, so where are the creatures? Should it really be controversial to suggest that there are more impactful factors at play here than gradual changes in climate or weather? What happens when bees go extinct from pesticide contamination? Whatever your view is I guarantee that you have not looked up earths temperature, Co2 levels and thermal capturability data or the carbon cycle and the magnitudes of carbon that it contains. The amount of Co2 released by fossil fuels is laughably tiny when compared to the amount released natural causes, we can't even properly measure or understand the levels that are released through natural causes because the cycle is so unimaginably vast.
Maybe more efficient RuBisCO was produced at some time in the past, but those plant was draining microelements from earth too fast, so it became not suitable for plant life anymore, so they all died.
The parallels to tweaking a legacy software are high. Ignoring the potential to introduce bugs in the genome, you will hit race conditions and bottlenecks that can turn disastrous for us, the plant, or the ecosystem, but we have to start somewhere you cannot just sit a new dev and told him to create a new plant from scratch, make him learn on existing software first. Ideally of course a super-plant of our own creation would be the best, like a super version of the fortified yellow rice with proteins to construct vitamin A added.
There are plants that have carbon concentrating mechanisms to increase rubiscos efficiency and decrease photorespiration. Plants like cacti, algae who have structures called pyrenoids. Look up C4 photosynthesis and CAM photosynthesis Really cool video but I wish the video got more technical, saying rubisco grabs an oxygen rather than a carbon makes it harder for me to understand, you could have just said the enzyme can react with oxygen instead of carbon and then give the name of this malfunction and I would have liked to know if this happened in light or dark reactions i had to figure that out for myself Knowing how diverse the plant kingdom is we can only assume theres a plant that handles rubisco better than some, throughout biology we can start to see “minor” imperfections in things that still took billions of years to build, things like coral bleaching can be another example of photosynthesis not working very well at hotter temperatures.
maybe it's inefficient for a reason. Nature is all about equilibrium with all species. If we move the equilibrium, maybe symbiosis with other species is disturbed and the plants cannot thrive.
Maybe investigating on desert plants can reveal clues of how to make the molecule more efficient. After all, these plants are able to survive and reproduce in the worst conditions possible. If you give them good conditions, they should explode in productivity.
considering you can greatly enhance the speed of plant growth with magnetic fields... i wonder if rubisco simply works better with a stronger magnetic field.
In that research, how can the scientists know the bacteria stay alive because the Rubisco works better but not other ways like the FRK work less or the product of FRK being degraded by other ways instead of Rubisco?
I feel like this could make for a good cataclysm plot, like genetically modifying plans to be so efficient that it causes all other life forms to be obsolete. I could see it. Like an ultra weed that grows fast enough that you can visibly see it grow and it soon encapsulates the earth.
Imagine how insane it would be, if we developed a substantially better method of photosynthesis in a plant... and then that plant escaped, and thanks to its massive advantage in photosynthesis, it would outcompete all the natural plants. Yet it would be amazing for food production. Imagine we could double our crop yields.
It's important to remember that alongside the issues described in this video, different types of plants use different pathways for photosynthesis: C3, C4, and CAM. These pathways are suitable for different environments, situations, and nutrient profiles. eg: CAM is optimized for hotter environments, there's evidence that C3 plants require excessive amounts of soil potassium to function properly when there's 575 PPM or greater atmospheric CO2, etc. etc. etc.
this is what I was thinking, C4 and CAM plants developed other strategies to bypass Rubisco's unspecific intake (meaning that by these strategies Rubisco doesn’t take O2 at all)
As a layman, I suspected plants might have found a work around considering the range of climates they live in today and in the past. It sounds a bit sensationalist to me.
@@Pid75 A "workaround" in evolutionary terms can easily mean mass die-offs, with only a small percentage of the planet's life surviving and very slowly proliferating as a result. And it's no different with C3, C4, and CAM plants, as the history of their individual rises and falls demonstrate.
@@Pid75 The flaws in the system discussed in the video ABSOLUTELY DO apply to a large majority of plants. The "workaround" in question does not exist in C3 plants, which work entirely on "Just have enough chloroplasts going, and surely a few of them will get some work done". This means that entire families of plants cannot stand high heat conditions, for example. The entirety of legumes and most deciduous trees are examples of C3 plants. Because of this, all of these plants are potential models to target RuBisCO, as well. It's a shame he didn't mention these alternate metabolic strategies, but only some plants use them.
An important thing to note however is that while C4 and CAM bypass the RubisCO problem, the way they do it costs more energy than a simple C3 RubisCO-carbon pathway... Hence why not everyone uses it.
"im not going to be kink shamed on rubisco, all right?" LMFAOOO
our fate is in the right hands
@@avocados1707 Is their a “translate to old english” button
This project would potentially be catastrophic for the natural world where the RuBisCO enzyme is fundamentally less efficient. Modified plants with better photosynthesizing capabilities would easily outcompete the native plants. We already know what havoc an invasive species can do to an ecosystem, let alone a super plant/gene would have on the world. This can only be done in very controlled environments such as lab grown food or well controlled industrial applications.
Unfortunately true, these super plants would be great for use in space
Plants also require a certain amount of water, nitrogen, phosphorus and other minerals to survive and are limited by those. Most invasive species simply produce a lot of viable seeds and many fix their own nitrogen, but our crops have very low germination rates, require special attention to reach seedling stages typically and require an unnatural amount of fertilizers. When you consider that nitrogen is typically the limiting factor to a plants growth, I see this having little to no ability to produce invasive plants species. In fact, even if we produced highly efficient RuBisCO enzymes and engineered plants to perfectly fix nitrogen, I doubt those plants would take over because being plentiful and edible makes you predated on more, especially when your seeds have had human aid for their sowing for thousands of years.
Not to mention that these enzymes might work in some other ways we don't understand. No modification unless it's really safe.
Right? Theyd turn into kudzus
@@bmanpura Kinda a dumb argument given that any modification to any protein is possible given the variation in mutations that occur with every successive generation. You may as well be against selective breeding for the exact reason, except you have even less of a clue of what the outcomes will be in that case because it's random instead of artificial.
crucial in tropical, hot climates. consider that leaves are mostly green because it wants to reject/reflect the most energetic part of the sunlight's spectrum.
If that were true, then hard shade understory plants would be purple.
Modern plants are green because chlorophyll was not the first photosynthetic kid on the block.
The water splitting cyanobacteria were late to the sunlight game, and all the good frequencies (green) were already monopolized by bacteriorhodopsin armed archaea and bacteria.
@@NullHand Can we make plants that use that instead?
@@wolvenedge6214 Possibly in some far distant future of biotech.
The Archaea and some bacteria that use this form of phototrophy don't use it to fix CO2 and create reducing power.
They use it to create a proton gradient across a membrane and run ATP Synthase directly.
Kinda like a solar powered mitochondrion.
When they evolved this there was no free oxygen on Earth, so reducing power wasn't needed.
@@NullHand Yes but the bacteria do this because they just use the ATP directly. Plants need to undergo the calvin cycle in order to turn the ATP and NADPH produced in the light-independent reactions into Glucose, which can be stored for longer than ATP and easily transported through the Phloem from sugar sources to sinks.
@@NullHand You seem to know a lot about it, would be cool if you made videos about the topic!
The biggest dilemma is that CO2 at 0.04% in the atmosphere is way lower than the 70% when photosynthesis first started billions of years ago. Nature has increased the synthesis of RuBisCo and evolved various carbon concentrating methods to balance this out and still make lots of product from minimal reactants. It may be a better conservation strategy to limit methane in the atmosphere and actively extract water vapour by using wind power.
Right,
Strictly concerning plants and photosynthesis increased Co2 levels are purely a benefit. Idk why people feel the need to lie about this.
We just can't have nuance I suppose.
Co2 bad!!
Methane is the biggest danger not CO2 but that can't be used by governments to justify more control so it isn't mentioned.
You mean when 99% of our current plant species didn’t exist and the world was dominated by cyanobacteria that live in the ocean not in the ambient climate…. Right, maybe rethink this one.
@@JKenny44 Heat stress is not a benefit, you and the other misinformation guru are describing life in the boring billion, which was incompatible with human life.
@@lewis7242 Well the plants have done pretty well these past 2-3 billion years being on the land so I think we will be okay. Plus we have things like the svalbard seed vault to preserve species if need be.
All the plants in the world have very inefficient Rubisco. Could there be a reason that this evolutionarily benefits them?
it's most likely that making more Rubisco is good enough for photosynthetic organisms
1) rubisco is good enough for survival
2) any change to rubisco's amino acid pattern (a mutation) is more likely to result in an enzyme that doesn't function at all, rather than one that functions better.
I recommend checking out Arnold Bloom’s research on this. In short, he makes the case that photorespiration is advantageous for nitrogen absorption. It’s a tad controversial but definitely an interesting idea.
not efficient enough for our greed ? ... but as efficient as they need
perfection isnt the purpose of evolution, its just survival. there are a lot of quite messy ways to survive and thrive in this world.
It’s the name. Rubisco sounds like dollar store cookies.
Sounds like a knock off coffee brand
Or a failed kickstarter of a better rubix cube
Rubisco vs Nabisco
Creme betweens vs oreos
There's a brand of biscuits called Rebisco
@@jskksjjskksj I guess I must have seen it and filed it in my subconscious.
Fun fact: if photosynthesis was just a few % more efficient, it would become possible for humans to survive solely off of it. In fact, it's already theoretically possible using rates accessible by algae, if ideal conditions are provided.
Energy is ultimately a numbers game, and as it turns out sunlight has a LOT of energy in it, even when most of it is wasted.
EDIT: Another fun fact is that we already have the capability of converting sunlight into something useful with melanin standing in for chlorophyll, and it's actually more effective at its job than chlorophyll due to capturing all of the colors instead of rejecting green, the only problem is that it's only capable of making Vitamin D instead of making the sugars and oxygen needed to sustain animal life.
Ummm. Melanin is not involved in a constructive way in the creation of Vitamin D.
That happens non-enzymaticaly by UV directly striking and breaking one of the rings in 7-dehydrocholesterol.
Melanin in humans is basically sunblock, simply absorbing UV and converting it to heat before it can mutate DNA by dimerization.
Levels of skin pigmentation basically try to tune the balance between letting enough UV in to avoid ricketts while not killing the largest organ of your body with radiation damage from the excess.
Tropical UV levels demand more screening than temperate. Summer demands more than winter.
Gonna need a source. Given that all the calculations of how much an energy a mammal would get from photosynthsis that I've ever seen aren't even close to filling caloric needs. There's a *huge* difference between trying to sustain a cold blooded vs a warm blooded animal with photosynthesis.
You need like a thousand square meters of land to produce enough food to sustain a human with a vegan diet and under ideal growing conditions. Yet it is supposed to be possible with like 2 square meters of skin of which at most half can face the sun at a time?
@@noergelstein tbf part of that is because we are intensly wastefull eaters who only eat the seeds on a plant, but even if we were capable of eating bamboo I don't think a single person has the surface area to use the energy available from sunlight.
@@noergelstein That thousand square meters of land isn't supporting one person, it's usually supporting a city or town of people. It also goes into inefficient practices such as growing animals, as well as producing bio-fuel so not all of it is feeding people.
Run the numbers yourself if you don't believe me, you'll find that just a few % in efficiency makes all the difference in the world. I did the math because I was making a mod for a game with really annoying hunger mechanics and ended up having to nerf it twice because it was too strong.
Both dry ethanol and dry acetone should work for "the special chemical" in the rbscCO precipitation mentioned. Usually 2:1, dessicative precipitation. 🥰
This feels like the biology equivalent of room temperature superconductors: Would be awesome if someone figured it out, and we're getting closer, but it's taken decades and at this point your peers will look at you funny for working on it.
It is a big step into the direction of cheap human nutrition
The scientist to work on this are heroes
meh not really at all. Room temperature superconductor would require finding an entirely undiscovered physics phenomenon. Whereas using bacteria to randomly mutate rubisco until a better one is inevitably found is just how all incremental improvement has ever worked.
@@lemonke8132 From a purely scientific perspective, you're right. I'm referring more to the culture in academia surrounding those who work on the two issues.
@@robertunderwood1011 Is it though? In reality we could just crisper the plant to have more chloroplasts for more energy production.
Nah that's jus not how physics works. I don't think that is a fair equivalent
RuBiSCO also evolved for cyanobacteria originally--critters that have these specific structures called carboxysomes that concentrate CO2 enough to help the enzyme work better.
Genuinely wild seeing other folks out here talking about RuBisCO.
Alsl at some point, when the ideal conditions are met, the photosynthesis is delayed by the lack of CO2 in the air, that's why some greenhouses burn gas to make more CO2.
It's worse than lack of CO2...every 88 years or so, our Sun gets a bit 'special'
Gliesberg cycle it's called...a periodic shift in the solar spectrum.
For about 5-8 years, plants on Earth will tend to 'bolt'...the same thing happens when you plant seeds late in the season.
Plants 'know' the seasons by the color of Sunlight...bluer during Summer, redder during Fall and Winter.
During a cycle, the Sun stays in 'Fall red' for the entire year.
Last time we saw a cycle was 1938...things were getting interesting all over.
Count backwards by 88 from there...1850, 1762, 1674, 1586.
It's not an exact match, but damn...world events and Gleisberg line up pretty darn well.
"Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times"
Four human generations...88 years...the cycle has come by so often, it shows up in literature.
Note how carbon foot print policies is about reducing carbon dioxide. What do plants need to survive and grow?
Greenhouses add more co2 for the plants when they can make sure the inside is cool enough for the plants to metabolize it. In general, plants metabolize co2 slower when they are over their preferred temperature range.
An air conditioned greenhouse can handle more co2, those in the gradually heating up wild cannot.
@@coreytran7415
Electrolytes?
@@coreytran7415Well yeah right now there's too much of it and the excess heat and unpredictable climate are hindering plant growth.
What was your point again?
Maybe it's as efficient as it needs to be to maintain equilibrium with atmospheric O2/CO2?
Also, your graphic had mushrooms growing from the RuBisCo molecule. Fungi aren't plants and are an entirely different kingdom that does not produce RuBisCo.
Any co2 that a plant takes in will inevitably be returned to the air so that argument doesn't go, also there's way too much co2 in the air rn anyway.
@@cris-kp2ge As far as plants are concerned, CO2 content needs to increase 100x because right now they're basically suffocating, and the entire reason they're still alive is because they can live at extremely low metabolic rates and their body is 90% lungs.
@@cris-kp2ge 422.17 parts per million tip: if you slow down your movement and metabolism you will emit less co2
@@michaelbuckers Plants are not suffocating, RuBisCO is suffocating. Plants are more complex than RuBisCO. When you increase atmospheric CO2, RuBisCO is happy, but plants begin to suffer from heat stress and increasing damage from parasites and pathogens. Worsening floods and droughts do not help the situation either. Earth's current plant species have evolved to thrive in Earth's current conditions, minus the effect of humans. Drastically altering those conditions will not give you a good result.
@@cris-kp2ge No, plant and algal matter very regularly is buried and is not returned to the atmosphere unless we dig it up. That's how coal and oil is made.
Fellow scientist here: This video, is soooo well made! The explanations and animations are just 10/10 great job!!
I want this to be my job instead ;__;
7:40 why does he directly inject the leaves and not the vascular tissue??
Where was this video during my plant physiology class?
6:30 Literally me at work when it gets extra busy and the barely manageable level of everyday stress exceeds the tipping point...
Maybe the inefficiency of this protein works as a way for more biomass to be produced and consumed by animals? I doubt such inefficiency would be a net negative without being a positive elsewhere.
Good take
Unfortunately for the evolution "good enough" is often where the progress stops. There are plenty examples of simply bad evolutionary traits with no redeeming qualities. They are not evolved out of because better alternatives would at the start be worse before they surpass the existing option and thus loose evolutionary competition early on.
It is a problem of local optimum also common in evolutionary machine learning: system reaches the closest high point of the function and stays there, even though there is a way better peak a few steps away - but to reach it the function has to go down first, and it is designed to always go up.
This inefficiency exists, because this protein is hard to mutate.
@@AtilaElari I can understand that, but countless of mutations and life competing would at least fix the issue for a few plants by now, at least those plants living with limited access to energy, such as those near the poles. So far that is not the case... I wonder why. But yes, it may just be bad luck, just as plants found out sexual reproduction way later than other organisms.
That doesn't make sense because biomass production itself can't happen without a lot of energy consumption. It has to obey thermodynamics.
I feel like RuBisCO is like that coconut.jpg in the Team Fortress 2 game files. It got put in the code at the very beginning and somehow became a vital part of it, so now you just can't mess around with it or else everything breaks. Evolution has been forced to keep RuBisCO there in its current state even though it's inefficient and makes no sense. That means slight changes to the protein probably make it even worse at it's job. Its stuck in a potential well it can't escape without a big push, but natural evolution doesn't work that way. You'd probably have to do a major redesign all at once to improve it, not just slight incremental changes. But if humans CAN intentionally redesign it to be more efficient outside of the evolutionary pressures on plant survival and then stick it back into plants, it could radically change life on this planet.
So if RuBisCo is a protein and plants overproduce it because of its inefficiency, plants contain more protein than they would if RuBisCo was efficient. Isn’t that a good thing for human nutrition?
Probably more important for animal nutrition- we can make up the difference with meat, cows can’t. You are right in that the lower protein feed will be a likely issue
Humans don't need plant protein they need animals protein and vitamins with plants vitamins to be healthy
thats not the same protein as meat
@@honkhonk8009 Yes it is
@@honkhonk8009No all proteins are same it is just have different amino acid distrubution
It's weird you made a video about rubisco without talking about the C4 plants which have fixed the issue
Very few of those tbh.
Greta video and topic! Kind of surprised that there is no mention of the evolution of RubisCO prior to land plans and the trade offs of photoinhibition. Phytoplankton and photosynthetic bacteria/archaea have been dealing with the toxicity of too much photosynthesis occurring for a larger period of evolutionary history. And it’s also a problem with other light capturing- carbon fixing systems. Also, there’s no point about the misconception that evolution is an optimization process. It’s not but that doesn’t mean that evolution results in tons of creative solutions. Lastly, I’ll say that I think that this research IS really neat and has the best application for solar cells that use synthetic photosynthesis to more efficiently and cheaply harness light, but I think it’s not as useful to try and make crops or other land plants of interest “more photosynthetically efficient” (because you also have to rework all the other biochemical pathways in the plants to deal with these major changes, oh and you don’t want any lab strains to be released into nature either).
This guy is going to be the next Veritasum. Informative, well thought out and spoken, and a thoroughly entertaining pace and tone.
Incredible video and very interesting, thank you!
one of the most impressively edited news outlets, yet so underrated and overlooked by the yt algorithm. such a damn shame less than one million people are seeing this
Found a new favorite science channel
The rubisco enzyme is purposely inefficient as we depict it. The enzyme needs to work in strict contact with ferredoxin which can catalyse some dangerous reactions resulting in ROS that can kill the plant if RuBisCo incorporates more O2 than CO2. This can happen in a CO2-less or lightless ambient, in which the inefficacy of rubisco prevents the death of plants. So nature and evolution nailed it as the way it is, and we cannot do that better.
I'm astonished that scientists can be so blithe to fuck around with chemistry that took billions of years to evolve to its current state. Wouldn't it be wise to pause and ask WHY RuBisCo is so apparently "inefficient" and what role that inefficiency might play in both physiology and ecology? More importantly, ending world hunger (like climate change) is not really a science problem; it's a political problem. We could end world hunger with the technologies we already have; we just don't have the political will to do so.
Why is this channel dead . This is very good informative channel
I absolutely loved the science behind this and how it's explained to the viewers, but I think this topic deserves more depth and philosophic questions: how is it intended to be applied to crops? will it be another way for big companies such as Monsanto to get a monopol on agricultural resources around the world? is there an ecological risk despite absorbing more carbon from the atmosphere?
Should we play with nature at this scale is another one but most importantly we should never reply "yes" without ever asking ourselves whys and hows
lets make this channel more popular, the videos are insanely good and the views dont correspond to the quality they deliver
The art and animation in this is amazing! What an interesting proof of concept and a cool idea for a series!
This is fantastic science communication. 10/10.
Subscribed.
For C3 plants (like wheat and rice): the optimal temperature range for photosynthesis is between 20-30°C (68-86°F).
For C4 plants (like maize and sugarcane), it is between 30-40°C (86-104°F)
also stomatal closure happens at these higher temperatures, to keep in moisture.
I was alway taught that plants don't really grow on very hot and sunny days, in any case these two effects happen at around the same temperatures and have. compounding effect.
the world has been hot before, and this magical protein they are searching for never materialized despite countless mutations and literal eons of evolutionary pressure.
so my bet Is that this is a fundamental limitation and will never be solved.
Actually there evolved at least two better photosynthesises in plants: C4 and CAM. Even though the last few million years saw record low carbon dioxide levels, these mechanisms are still only found in a limited number of species specialised for hot dry climates. On the other hand, it wasn’t really hot during that time.
You can literally see the "magical" superior protein in the video if you'd watch it, but you'd rather maintain ignorance and keep spouting fossil fuel talking points.
@@filonin2 could you point me to a time stamp?
Just ignore the blocking of the sun.
Once this gets out into nature it will completely change the equilibrium between plant matter and everything else.
I am not sure the genes would spread that way. It might still be difficult for one species with the advantage, to take over a different evolutionary slot without millions of years of time or something.
@@colorado841 True, but if the situation gets dire enough we might have to consider spreading it to wild flora intentionally. A global bioengineering project should be a last resort, we don't know what the consequences would be, we should be focused on curbing emissions and holding corporations accountable, but it won't hurt to have a hail Mary in our back pocket.
@@colorado841however, if it gets into cyanobacteria populations, you might start to see horizontal gene transfer between many different unicellular photosynthesizing species
This concept is already in play with algaes and photosynthetic bacterias that we use for bio oils, except kinda the opposite effect from what you’re imagining. We can easily make these organisms super efficient mass producers in the lab. But when we put that plump little organism in a trough or stream outside they are candy to the rest of the food chain. The genetics die with that generation and they have to be reseeded in the lab because they can’t out reproduce their predation rate. A fundamental survival strategy is to *not* get fat and full of nutrients, because organisms like that are first in line to get eaten. We get around this with our crops by protecting them (kinda, you should see the damage one bear can do to a corn field or one goat to an alfalfa field or one pest to a crop without anti pest genes, etc), and natural “high yield” food plants thrive commonly by making their reproduction linked to their predation-like seeds being pooped around- or by protecting their storage like underground tubers or spikes or woody shells… all of those options present extra obstacles that eat up energy to harvest them. But the more nutritious it is, the more effort all of our competitors will make to eat it before we want to harvest it. It’ll be interesting to see how this tries to go forward.
@@Nitsirtriscuit I appreciate the comment but I have to say, that's a really bad comparison. These situations aren't as related as you make them sound
Can see you getting well-known, Vox level work and even more just from the enthusiasm
I've worked with field batch tests of certain crop traits- like pest resistance or weather tolerance. Interesting line of work.
This is honestly the best chance we have at becoming a type 1 civilization. I think the complex mechanisms of living things along with their ease of use make it perfect for gathering energy more cost effectively than Solar
Aren't there a few specific plants that use a different, more efficient process of photosynthesis? I'm pretty sure I heard something like that - does anyone know the plant's/process' name?
Ah, found a relevant video: "Fixing the flaw in Photosynthesis" by But Why?. The different processes are called C3 ("normal") photosynthesis and C4 photosynthesis. The latter occurs in some hot+arid-adapted plants.
There's a different type of photosynthesis called the C4 pathway. It basically prevents the binding of O2 with RuBisCO by increasing the amount of CO2 at the site of it's functionality.
Might have something to do with the fact that it evolved at the time where earth atmosphere was 99% CO2 and now it's well below 0.1%.
Ok dumb question here but wouldn't the bacteria just develop resistance to PRK the same way they develp resistance against antibiotics like creating proteins that break down PRK or proteins that pumps out the toxic products or binds them away or turn them into less toxic metabolites?
Im no scientist, but it got me thinking that maybe Rubisco efficient plants wouldn't feel the need to grow as big as they are with the bad enzyme. Imagine they are ok and happy with just a couple of leaves instead of a giant canopy. And that would be great for the plants, but maybe not so great for the other organisms depending on it, including us.
Just a thought. Perhaps that's not how it works at all.
Make super-weeds? What could possibly go wrong?
Everyone gets super-high.
@@omegahaxors9-11Faaaaaar Out, Man! 🥴😅
are they eddible? super weeds can destroy the environment.
It sure would be weird if the millions of square miles dedicated to monoculture farming thats almost entirely predicated on unsustainable groundwater or low efficiency irrigation had a negative effect on the environment.
@@ShumaBot The cause of problems is solutions.
I wonder if uncontrolled plants with a new better enzyme would act as invasive species
There are more trees in the northern hemisphere today than there was 100 years ago.
The Sahara desert has been shrinking. It's called greening because plants are reclaiming the desert. Higher CO2 concentrations are allowing plants to get the CO2 they need to survive while losing less water.
100,000 years ago Florida was under water due to higher global temperatures melting the poles. Humans reached North America 20,000 years ago when temperatures were much colder allowing them to cross lower sea levels using ice sheats.
These nerds with their "save the world" experiments worry me more than climate change which has occurred throughout the history of the earth.
I'm totally about exploring technological options to expand energy efficiency in our food chains, but I'm super concerned about our food supply becoming more and more largely dependent upon patented foods rather than unpatented nature. Corporations will have an even greater chokehold on people.
This is the only type of genetic engineering that I have a problem with. Improving the photosynthetic ability of crops by a large margin is a very big very general advantage that is not specific to a farmland environment. Should this be done I fear a future where wild plants are outcompeted by a few handfuls of domestic plants. Vast open steppes of nothing but billowing grains and canola, deciduous forests of nothing but apple, cherry and almond trees, rainforests dominated by avocado and cocoa. Once that Pandora's box opens there would be a race against time to give the same advantage to all the wild plants if we were to want them to survive, but would we?
i feel like the best way to mitigate this is to only use these plants in hydroponic systems or make them not able to reproduce, though then that gets into planned obsolescence
@@justageekygamer Even if it was only legal to use them in hydroponics it's just a matter of time before they get out, and even if one make them unable to reproduce I feel that it is just a matter of time before some government somewhere would allow their farmers to grow these super-crops free of such impositions. If this rubisco engineering works out then I feel that we really need to start immediately figure out some mass distribution for these genes into wild plants, like crop dusting the jungle with retroviruses that just mass genetically modify all plant life. The consequences for life on earth would then still be entirely unforeseeable, it would by far make any Geoengineering project ever seriously proposed so far look mild in comparison.
@@Aurgelmir87well and it doesnt really matter at the end of the day is just another problem we can solve, what matters now is solving global warming then when we get that out of the way then we go from there
@@gamers-xh3uc This cure may very well be worse than the disease. Tbh I would rather we try the geoengineering projects like ocean fertilization or even atmosphere aerosol injection before contemplating this stuff which has the very real potential of changing the entire biosphere of planet earth.
@@Aurgelmir87Understandable concerns, but I’d argue that the scenario you described is extremely unlikely for most crops. Invasion ecology is complex. Higher growth rate does not necessarily equal enhanced fitness in a wild setting.
This video needs WAY MORE VIEWS AND EXPOSURE!
We need to change peoples negative perceptions on GMOs before we can really benefit from this
I agree lol, people here gmos and think they bad with no reason
If Rubisco was called something dramatic like the “Gaia Molecule” or some sci-fi esque name, I’m pretty sure politicians would pick it up and be proponents for photosynthesis R&D. More efficient photosynthesis means more energy captured from our sun and retained on this world - more energy means more progress for us.
I'll be very surprised if this project can do what 2.4 billion years of evolution could not.
The climate was a lot different until just a few centuries ago.
As if evolution worked like that. Just look at the human foot- it’s a terrible “design” but evolution goes with “good enough” not perfection. Or that fact that we evolved away from being able to make our own Vitamin C (other mammals can). Evolution is only about does it work enough to pass on genes. It’s a C student.
The world really isn't getting that much hotter, without dedicated teams of scientists, we wouldn't really notice. Besides, the greatest heat increases are coming from the urban heat island effect. Some plants grow in urban areas, but nothing critical...
3:17 nice try, guy. In the cretaceous average temperature and air oxygen content were both higher and plants are still here. They are gonna keep photosynthesizing as they did before
Don't you know that plantlife only thrive in the coldest regions on Earth?
Well if all plants are inefficient then none of them are
Yeah but the Cretaceous periods climate occurred overtime and a much more slower and natural pace. Climate change is happening rapidly, and so it may be harder for plants to adapt in time
turn the gain of your bass in the audio you dont need that to be more noticable
Awesome, I love this kind of research.
I was under the impression that RuBisCO had been bypassed by Tobias Erb whom you cite
I was also under the impression that the pathways to starch synthesis have been recently achieved
The world should be jumping up and down and screaming for joy
Can I assume that this means that farming can be bypassed and that the fundamental ingredients of human nutrition can be had by other means?
I understand that electrochemistry applied to cyanobacteria canal produce abundant protein
Seems like we’re in for some very interesting changes ahead !
Manny plants; like corn, rice, wheat and others, have already solved a great part of photorespiration (the enzyme’s mistake with O2) vía the C4 photosynthesis, there’s no need for this research, but for better regulation of industry emissions.
It's unknown if it's even possible for C3 plants to utilise the C4 pathway, so it's very important to invest in alternative pathways just in case there's a physiological constraint preventing the C4 pathway, and there's also the potential that they can be utilised together as the C4 pathway doesn't modify the Rubisco/RuBisCO itself, so if this research leads to better variants of Rubisco theoretically you can have the best of both worlds. And while yes we do need better regulations given that the majority of GHG emissions are by a handful of companies, more efficient Rubisco also allows for increased crop yields due to reduced energy wastage, so it's something to be pursed irrespective of climate concerns anyway.
We should appreciate scientists more, THEY are the reason all of us are still alive today
All the crops we’ve pushed to ‘grow faster’ have waaay less micronutrients than normal or older siblings of them and they dry up the land quicker too.
Those ones simply produce more sugar faster, which means less nutrition as they also consume it faster.
because we only had selective breeding and our options to modify the plants was limited and less understood then. None of the modifications improved the ability to generate more energy, but simply decreased growth time, with the same energy produced, so of course past attempts yielded less nutritious results and overall poorer plant health.
@@zyibesixdouze4863 but doesn improving rubisco also produce more sugar faster?
@@sahildhama6315 you're missing the point. Growing faster =/= producing sugar faster.
1) Plants that have been bred to grow faster still use rubiscoso they are naturally limited by it. This means a plant that was bred for faster growth would be one that has more rubisco but less of other proteins which would produce nutrition, and would simply be inefficient faster.
2) Of course when you are planting and harvesting more plants that the land dries up quicker, that's more plants.
3) Them having shorter lifespans because they grow faster also means that they had less time in the soil to develop nutritional volume in the first place.
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Replacing rubisco would be more akin to removing inefficiency because as the video describes, plants tend to have a lot of excess rubisco because they have evolved to run probability in parallel. If I wanted the result of 10 or higher on a ten-sided die, I could just roll 100 of those die. Replacing rubisco then would simply be increasing the number of faces on the die. If I wanted a result of >10 on a twenty-sided die, it would be a 55% chance as compared to a ten-sided's 10%.
This is so fascinating and inspiring for the future. I just hope that when this technology is ready for the market, society won't reject it just cause the innovation came from a lab...
If it ain't broke, don't fit it. Heat stress in plants is a farming practice issue, not global warming. This is just another handicap to poor farming practices. The chemical companies open their pockets up to the universities and get their support but roundup ready crops have some of the weakest genetics and lowest yields I seen in a real world setting.
Robbie sounds like a hero
"CO2 into energy"
You mean food, or biomass? Plants get their energy from the sun (and water, technically, as it's the source of electrons).
Energy from the sun transforms water plus CO2 into sugar.
@@k.h.6991 Light energy is used to split water into breathable oxygen, and electrons and protons - which are used to make NADPH and drive production of ATP, respectively; then those are used to make sugar from CO2 further down the line.
This technology could be as impactful as nuclear fission, and would need to be as carefully managed and regulated. The potential benefits of more efficiently growing food crops could be enormous. But the ecological damage that could be caused by species of plants with this fundamental improvement on photosynthesis escaping into the wild could be catastrophic.
I wonder if the benefit of c4 and cam plants can be built into c3 plants
It's being worked on.
you need more subscribers! this is good stuff
I thought this was going to be about terrestrial and marine Photosynthesis decline...
it's been around for a while. maybe not the best scaffold, but well-suited to the current metabolome.
I didn't understand much but can AlphaFold help?
I'm sure all people involved in this are paiyng attention to AlphaFold3 progress
Alpha fold is usefull for unknown protein structures, Alpha Fold 3 though might be different
@@azertyuiop432 AlphaFold3 has already done his job, predicting more than 200 million proteins, wich is around 98% of all proteins in existence. It might be usefull
Probably not. Alphafold2 guesses protein structure if you give it an amino acid sequence. It isn’t great at determining function and you can’t go backwards easily from function to structure to amino acid sequence.
You forgot to mention C4 plants which are adapted for the very job of fixing carbon better at higher temperature and lower water use.
Sorry while I am getting the point that we could improve performance of Photsynthesis. However saying that global warming might make Rubisco even do worse is a bit of a stretch. Climate is a multi factor system so let’s not use this as a buzzword. For such an important thing for life on earth, i think it deserves some respect and benefit of the doubt.
Also, we all know that for eons, there were times that out climate was hotter SIGNIFICANTLY hotter than today if Rubisco is really doing a poor job we would not be here now. Alas, we’re here!! Thank God! 🙏🏻 this begs the question could there be reasons why Rubisco is what it is? I mean this isn’t the first that Nature taught us a thing or two. If we also follow evolution, then there should have been evolutionary pressure to optimize this and if it didn’t happen then there’s probably a good reason why it didn’t.
While I ok with research for the sake of greater understanding let’s not get ahead of ourselves and call us masters of nature. This also means we should tread carefully about tinkering with Photosynthesis process.
Ignorance like this is going to get people killed.
Every time we try to outdo Nature, we end up knocking the finely tuned edge of balance that was shaped after a Billion years of life on Earth. I'm not so sure redesigning photosynthesis through a GMO could end well.
Maybe there’s a reason Nature made the essential rubisco enzyme so inefficient…
Hope not…
not a reason, but a constraint
idiots don't get it. Only been around for 2 billion + years and its stuck around. Cam and C4 just use a modified system, but still rubisCO
If you can find out the reason, publish your findings and collect your Nobel prize.
Speculation gets us nowhere.
there's other bottlenecks in plant growth, like nitrogen and other compounds available in the soil, so a plant won't just grow faster if you improve 1 aspect, it will just hit another bottleneck faster. There's C4 photosynthesis already, which IIRC is a fix to the oxygen problem and with water management, and is found in hotter regions. Like 3% of plants but 5% of plant biomass uses it, and 25% of carbon capture, so despite capturing a lot, it only leads to a small biomass advantage. So it exists, and it naturally evolved, but it still takes time to spread in places where other aspects matter more than photosynthetic efficiency.
4:31 If anyone gonna go into town and penetrate the bottleneck of RuBisCO, that gotta be Robbie
Or we could just stop boiling the earth 😑 it seems to have been working fine til we came along
Hearing you explain this, I can't help but think of Richard Lenski's LTEE with E. coli. So many parallels!
You dont see any problem in this?
many
many 😂
this channel is popping off
Something's up with the eq on ur audio....needs a cut in the bottom end. Way too much low bass going on. Sounds great off a phone speaker obvs, on headphones people would maybe say rich, but on a TV system it's boxy and boomy as hell. I just turned bass to min and now it's terrible and boxy because modern music/tv/blend technology is crap but that's another story😂. I know RUclips audio is a minefield of "experts" and people overthinking it when literally any mic is good enough and 90% of people are watching on phones anyway but yeah.. your content is high end, shame to have it sound bad even if it's for a minority. Just A B your audio with a few randomly selected half decent channels if you need a reference or just cut the low bass on your vocal track
Edit: it's the voiceover track. Sort the mic placement or just eq it. Check the difference between that and the location audio of the producer 👊🙏
true on my setup with subwoofer even on flat EQ. however, im mostly EQ tuned for narration videos-I watched this in full without the boomy audio.
Do you think if plants were more efficient they would evolve to be inedible, or even actively deadly to us like mould, something that completely changes the current dynamic?
Do you think plants would even evolve if we had hyper-efficient photosynthetic bacteria? Is the deficiency caused by the over-efficiency of simply evolving ways to kill competitors rather than to update the process of production?
Robbie is part of our predicament, not a solution to any problem. Don't be like Robbie.
Be a subtle reed, not a mighty oak.
Exactly, people are so brainwashed it's scary, Co2 is a good thing, we could have 20x the Co2 levels that we have today and everything would be perfectly fine, better even.
@@crazyjay6331
Well, the plants would be fine.
You'd black out within 2 minutes and die of Co2 poisoning.
@@JKenny44 no you wouldn't, you would get a bad headache at worst but only because you're not adapted to it yet. Current atmospheric Co2 concentration is 400/450ppm, it used to be at 8,000ppm over time that has oscillated on a downward trend, during the last ice age (10,000 years ago) the Co2 levels dropped so low (150ppm) that plants (especially fruiting plants) couldn't photosynthesise properly. You need Co2 ppm as high as 10,000+ more like 50,000 for it to cut off oxygen supply in the blood. We're never gonna release enough Co2 to do that, not even close. We're talking increases of a couple hundred ppm, which would benefit nature and our farms. Co2 and heat are not responsible for this mass extinction event, chemical and plastic pollution, sewage and farmland mismanagement etc, cities, factories and war goblins are responsible. "Green energy" is responsible. It's all a scam, don't recycle, incinerate it, don't pass that plastic onto to the next generation. The biomass of the planet is going up but the species diversity is going down, more biomass means more food and habitat, so where are the creatures? Should it really be controversial to suggest that there are more impactful factors at play here than gradual changes in climate or weather? What happens when bees go extinct from pesticide contamination? Whatever your view is I guarantee that you have not looked up earths temperature, Co2 levels and thermal capturability data or the carbon cycle and the magnitudes of carbon that it contains. The amount of Co2 released by fossil fuels is laughably tiny when compared to the amount released natural causes, we can't even properly measure or understand the levels that are released through natural causes because the cycle is so unimaginably vast.
Maybe more efficient RuBisCO was produced at some time in the past, but those plant was draining microelements from earth too fast, so it became not suitable for plant life anymore, so they all died.
0:49 why do you have to push your BS? During Carboniferous period it was much hotter and plants thrived.
There's a major difference between the planet getting hotter over millions of years, and it getting hotter over decades
Why are you Ina science channel and calling climate change BS
The word Rubisco gave me biology class flashbacks but i don’t even remember what it is
The parallels to tweaking a legacy software are high. Ignoring the potential to introduce bugs in the genome, you will hit race conditions and bottlenecks that can turn disastrous for us, the plant, or the ecosystem, but we have to start somewhere you cannot just sit a new dev and told him to create a new plant from scratch, make him learn on existing software first. Ideally of course a super-plant of our own creation would be the best, like a super version of the fortified yellow rice with proteins to construct vitamin A added.
my worry is that making this more efficient rubisco and giving it to our crops, the normal non-modified plants will be outcompeted
There are plants that have carbon concentrating mechanisms to increase rubiscos efficiency and decrease photorespiration. Plants like cacti, algae who have structures called pyrenoids.
Look up C4 photosynthesis and CAM photosynthesis
Really cool video but I wish the video got more technical, saying rubisco grabs an oxygen rather than a carbon makes it harder for me to understand, you could have just said the enzyme can react with oxygen instead of carbon and then give the name of this malfunction and I would have liked to know if this happened in light or dark reactions i had to figure that out for myself
Knowing how diverse the plant kingdom is we can only assume theres a plant that handles rubisco better than some, throughout biology we can start to see “minor” imperfections in things that still took billions of years to build, things like coral bleaching can be another example of photosynthesis not working very well at hotter temperatures.
maybe it's inefficient for a reason. Nature is all about equilibrium with all species. If we move the equilibrium, maybe symbiosis with other species is disturbed and the plants cannot thrive.
And? We have already destroyed the equilibrium, we have to use iron fist to keep it stable if not everything is gonna be destroyed
@@gamers-xh3uc
Plant are more efficient at photosynthesis as a result of increased Co2 levels.
It far outweighs the associated change in temperature.
Maybe investigating on desert plants can reveal clues of how to make the molecule more efficient. After all, these plants are able to survive and reproduce in the worst conditions possible. If you give them good conditions, they should explode in productivity.
Cross Breeding plants has had great advantages.
Are we helping agriculture as well as the whole environment and conservation?
considering you can greatly enhance the speed of plant growth with magnetic fields... i wonder if rubisco simply works better with a stronger magnetic field.
In that research, how can the scientists know the bacteria stay alive because the Rubisco works better but not other ways like the FRK work less or the product of FRK being degraded by other ways instead of Rubisco?
One of the greatest videos I've ever seen thank you.
This video is soo wholesome, keep up the good work, make more content. This is good stuff!
Hey evolving rubisco sounds cool but is anyone working to evolve collagen? Just a thought.
And then corporate comes in and ruin everything
Really? Last time we met she told me all was good ... strange. I hope she feels better soon!
I feel like this could make for a good cataclysm plot, like genetically modifying plans to be so efficient that it causes all other life forms to be obsolete. I could see it. Like an ultra weed that grows fast enough that you can visibly see it grow and it soon encapsulates the earth.
They will go short on C02 and starve
Imagine how insane it would be, if we developed a substantially better method of photosynthesis in a plant... and then that plant escaped, and thanks to its massive advantage in photosynthesis, it would outcompete all the natural plants.
Yet it would be amazing for food production. Imagine we could double our crop yields.
Maybe RuBisCo is there to prevent thermal runaway? (🤔Fukushima?)