11 ms·
Accelerating Photosynthesis
- zeofig 7y agoNeat site, but it would be good to have some information on who created it, who did this research, and who (if anyone) funded it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- abdullahkhalids 7y agoAbsolutely. Just because there are references at the end doesn't mean this is credible. There is a lot of work and expertise that goes into selecting the right and reasonably complete set of references, then accurately and correctly synthesizing information from those references into the current work. Part of this expertise is signaled by knowing who wrote the thing. Otherwise, absent expert peer review, no one should be believing any of this.
- IshKebab 7y agoAnd if it actually worked. Seems like they described some kind of experimental setup and then just stopped? I only skimmed it though.
- mkj 7y agoTeam's http://rubyplants.com/ruby-team.html http://rubyplants.com/ruby-team.html There's a map at the bottom of http://rubyplants.com/autonomous-chambers-2.html http://rubyplants.com/autonomous-chambers-2.html Seems to be a cute pivot from an online plant nursery??? https://www.sublimesucculents.com/plant-for-thought-online-nursery-interview/ https://www.sublimesucculents.com/plant-for-thought-online-n... Faster iteration does seem like it could give useful results, though unsure why they'd target plants not algae. Maybe plants are easier to contain?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aroch 7y agohttps://rubyplants.com/ruby-team.html https://rubyplants.com/ruby-team.html Not linked on the current home page for whatever be the reason
- wilgertvelinga 7y agoI like the totally novel angle of attack on the CO2 problem!
- the8472 7y agoAttempts to improve photosynthetic efficiency is not exactly novel, for example there is the IRRI C4 rice project[0] or various research on RuBisCO efficiency[1][2]. Speeding up the development process and trying to bring all the different improvements under one umbrella might be. [0] http://photosynthome.irri.org/C4rice/index.php/component/content/article/19-about/56-what-is-c4-rice http://photosynthome.irri.org/C4rice/index.php/component/con... [1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6368/1272 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6368/1272 [2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6422/eaat9077 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6422/eaat9077
- eb0la 7y agoNot exactly novel: we need to develop carbon capture technologies in order to survive, not just cut/curb CO2 and Methane emmisions. >410 CO2 PPM in the air means if we can magicaly cut emmisions to zero right now, there are tons of CO2 still warming the earth and they won't disappear by themselves.
- gitanovic 7y agoVery clear explanation, love the diagrams. To me this is a more sensible way than carbon tax, or even better use carbon tax to fund research like this. I don't think that economic incentives alone might fix the situation, and maybe not even slow it down sufficiently. We need political focus, and high investment in research.
- akie 7y agoThe benefit of a carbon tax is that you can introduce it immediately, provided that there's enough political will. If the carbon tax is sufficiently high I'm convinced there can be a very big net benefit. The approach from the article will take many years to provide any benefits, assuming 1) they get the efficiency increase they're aiming for 2) they can roll out these new & better plants on a large enough scale to make a difference 3) that the mass-introduction of these new plants doesn't have any unforeseen side-effects
- GordonS 7y agoI wonder if carbon tax revenues should be ring-fenced, and spent solely on endeavours just like the onein the article?
- adrianN 7y agoA large part of the carbon tax should be paid out as a dividend. Otherwise poor people can't afford to live anymore. Political acceptance is important for any climate policies.
- barry-cotter 7y agoThis is why I have no hope for anything other than a technological solution to climate change. Anything else would require either a very large decrease in the standard of living in the developed world, contributed poverty in the developing world or both.
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- pxndxx 7y agoCan't wait for a superplant to take over all ecosystems on earth! Hoping it's tasty at least.
- mytailorisrich 7y agoPitch black leaves everywhere...
- mnw21cam 7y agoThere was a Stargate episode based on this particular threat. It had Richard Dean Anderson going around shouting "It's a plant!"
- pvaldes 7y ago> Hoping it's tasty at least Crassulaceae (many succulents) are poisonous normally. They store acids if I remember correctly, so you can eat only very small amounts of them.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoPhotosynthesis is a strange beast... You know the cliché that something designed by evolution, or "natural", is usually pretty efficient, sort-of "in sync" with its surroundings, etc. For many things this subjectively holds true, with things like Spider silk, flight of large birds, a diving penguin, etc. Photosynthesis, and the core protein, Rubisco, is anything but! It's the central protein of live on earth, and yet... it's a totally ridiculous machine. You ever wonder what the inside of a typical cell sounds? In a cartoon it would be a high-pitched whining, because that correlates well with the typical speed at which some protein does its business when busy. Rubisco is the fat guy lazily picking up the hammer every once in a while, balancing it in the air, slamming it down and...missing 2/3 the time. So this idea does have potential. Unfortunately, the plant biophysics have been well understood for a few decades, and the idea isn't new or anything. I'd say the even-odds of doubling the CO_2 fixation of some plant we can grow on a large scale is about 20%. It is completely irresponsible to let this, and other such schemes, inform policy wrt climate change right now. Invest in research, yes. But using it to put of necessary changes is just motivated reasoning an will end with nothern russia looking like Florida, and Florida looking like what's 30km east of Florida now.
- chrisco255 7y agoSea levels are rising at 2-3mm a year. That's about a foot of sea level rise per century, assuming some combination of AMO negative phase, PDO negative phase, volcanic activity, geomagnetic reversal, increased cosmic rays and subsequent cloud cover due to increased nucleation and grand solar minimum due in the coming decades doesn't kick off a cooling trend that causes a mini ice age to set in and sea levels to fall, of course.
- Majestic121 7y agoI was surprised by your affirmation, as I had the (apparently wrong) assumption that sea levels would increase by at least a few meter in the century. However, the IPCC (UN group in charge of research for climate change) does predict an increase of ~0.2 to 0.5m (basically a foot) of the sea level in the next century. Here is the source for interested people : https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-5-1.html https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq...
- coolplants 7y agoPlants have had billions of years to evolve on Earth, if there were a more efficient way to photosynthesize, wouldn’t it have emerged by now through natural selection? For instance, I would imagine that competition in the Amazon amongst plants is high enough to have driven a photosynthesis efficiency arms race. Do different plants differ significantly in their photosynthesis efficiency? If so I would study the genomes of plants in the Amazon, or similarly competitive environments.
- maxerickson 7y agoIf the current solution is unstable and relatively far away from other solutions, you shouldn't necessarily expect random perturbations to lead to a different solution.
- adrianN 7y agoThe pressure on photosynthesis is likely pretty small because nutrients other than carbon dioxide are a limiting factor for almost all plants.
- chrisco255 7y agoThere already exist plants adapted for optimal yields at lower CO2 levels. They are classified as C4 plants and hit optimal photosynthesis at about modern levels. These include corn and sugarcane, but only make up a small fraction of overall plant species (about 5%). C3 plants hit optimal levels at higher concentrations, usually 1100-1300 ppm (90% of plants fit this category). See link below for more details: https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2020/01/08/heres-looking-at-you-co2/ https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2020/01/08/heres-looking-at-you... Now I don't know how the mechanics work. I don't know if you could genetically engineer a C3 plant to work as well as a C4 plant. I reckon there are significant tradeoffs there that nature already factored for.
- baptou12 7y ago"Add Green & Infrared Antennae Proteins" => Nature will become sad to watch
- pharke 7y agoAren't phytoplankton the biggest producers of oxygen? They also reproduce a lot faster than land based plants and would be easier to work with and iterate on. Why aren't they mentioned in this article?
- gliese1337 7y agoIf your goal is merely to pull CO2 out of the air, that would be the way to go. But that is not their goal; they want to increase agricultural yields to reduce the need for expansion of agricultural land. Pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere is a side-benefit.
- Gatsky 7y agoSomething I haven't seen mentioned much is the recent progress in single atom catalysts[1], which is a really cool idea. These seem able to convert CO2 to CO in high yield. This could be one way to start pulling a lot of CO2 out of the air efficiently. CO can then be used fro many chemical processes whether just sequestering carbon or otherwise. [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180301094857.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180301094857.h...
- grimwall 7y agoBeautiful work in automating the experiments and increasing the throughput, very innovative approach.
- carapace 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_forest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_forest > Forest gardening is a low-maintenance, sustainable, plant-based food production and agroforestry system based on woodland ecosystems, incorporating fruit and nut trees, shrubs, herbs, vines and perennial vegetables which have yields directly useful to humans. Making use of companion planting, these can be intermixed to grow in a succession of layers to build a woodland habitat.
- kidleroi 7y agoThe lack of authorship attribution or institutional affiliation is quite strange in this piece. Apparently a lot of effort was undertaken to write the software or at least to write the article. "We" and "our" appear in nearly every sentence. Who are "we"? The ideas in there are quite interesting to think about. I'm glad I read it, but questions like this are unsettling given the lack of expressed ownership: "Why bother with environmental control and especially environmental optimization when the goal is accelerating photosynthesis genomically?"
- beowulfey 7y agoRuby Plants (seemingly formerly known as Plants for Thought) were originally a storefront for succulents. I found an interview with people involved here [1]. [1] https://www.sublimesucculents.com/plant-for-thought-online-nursery-interview/ https://www.sublimesucculents.com/plant-for-thought-online-n...
- SamBam 7y agoVery interesting. That's quite a turn-around for a company like that. Although it sounds like they've spent a long time figuring out how to grow individual plants faster. And seemingly all without needing shady Epstein money and faking results, like a recent infamous MIT lab... If they're getting more serious, though, I think they might be better served by an editor's rewrite of their 15 pages of Khan Academy-like scribbled slides.
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- alisson 7y agoWhy forest can't be farms? They should not be opposite but complement each other.
- ptah 7y agowhy do i feel like i'm in the first part of a scifi movie that ends up in the destruction of all life on the planet due to "clever" science
- twic 7y agoNot sure if you read the news much, but we're not in the first part any more.
- burfog 7y agoThis is not correct: "Food is created by taking CO2, keeping the C and releasing the O2." The resulting O2 actually comes from a pair of H2O. Consider the reaction performed by purple sulfur bacteria, which are related by evolution but have a slightly different reaction. It is this: CO2 + 2 H2S gives [CH2O] + H2O + 2 S There, carbon dioxide reacts with hydrogen sulfide to give water, sulfur, and part of a carbohydrate. Photosynthesis in plants is the same sort of reaction, but the situation is less obvious because there is H2O on both sides of the reaction. We've proven what happens by experiments with radioisotopes. The entire photosynthesis reaction consumes 6 CO2 and 12 H2O to produce 6 H2O, 6 O2, and a sugar. From the 12 H2O, half of the H goes to the sugar and the other half goes to producing new H2O. From the 12 H2O, all of the O goes to producing O2. From the 6 CO2, half of the O goes to the sugar and the other half goes to producing new H2O. From the 6 CO2, all of the C goes to producing sugar.
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- Noxmiles 7y agoStill no photosynthesis for humans... :(
- fasteddie31003 7y agoI've always wondered if humans could create synthetic photosynthesis factories. Skip all the biological steps of creating cell walls and an immune system and just create sugars from light and CO2. I would imagine this technology would be especially valuable for space exploration. The whole plot of The Martian would disappear if Mark Watney had a carbohydrate machine.
- hanuman 7y ago> We are building a pipeline from FASTA files of genomes to deployment in our customer's facilities. This statement and the remainder of that paragraph is simply nonsense. The same can be said for much of the rest of the text. They are trying to resuscitate an old idea with pure hype.