Photosynthesis is necessary to sustain life on earth, but it is very inefficient. Biophysicist Roberta Croce receives an ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Grant for her research into improving photosynthesis.
Currently, less than one percent of accessible solar energy is turned into biomass in crops, and plants only utilize visible light, discarding more than half of the sunlight that reaches us. This is particularly limiting for crops.
Limits of photosynthesis
When plants grow close together, the lower leaves receive almost exclusively far-red light, which has been thought to be unusable for oxygenic photosynthesis. Recent discoveries, however, show that certain cyanobacteria, the ancestors of plant chloroplasts where photosynthesis takes place, can grow under far-red light. This insight challenges previous beliefs about the limits of photosynthesis.
Improved crop productivity
Croce aims to understand how these cyanobacteria utilize far-red light and explore if and how these mechanisms can be adapted to plants. To achieve these goals, she combines molecular biology, ultrafast spectroscopy, and modeling. This comprehensive approach is designed to investigate the feasibility and advantages of enabling far-red photosynthesis in plants, expanding their ability to absorb light and potentially offering a new strategy for improving crop productivity.
The ERC Advanced Grant, which consists of 2,5 million euros, provides long-term funding to leading principal investigators who want to pursue a ground-breaking, ambitious project [source].