LEC Seminar on photosynthetic carbon concentration (Dr Jess Pritchard)

Event Details

LEC Seminar Title: Exploring photosynthetic carbon concentration mechanisms Speaker: Dr Jessica Pritchard (LEC)

Bio

Jess is currently an 1851 Research Fellow working with Elizabete Carmo-Silva. She is interested in understanding how plants have adapted their photosynthetic mechanisms to survive and thrive across different environments, and how we could use this to bolster food security in our warming world.

Talk summary

Photosynthesis can be inefficient, especially in environments with extreme temperatures, or aquatic environments where accessing the required CO2 is slow. Organisms have evolved carbon concentration mechanisms (CCMs) to overcome this, with a range of methods to increase CO2 around the key photosynthetic enzyme Rubisco. If we could make use of some of these mechanisms in crops, there is the potential to improve water-use and photosynthetic efficiency. This talk will explore CCMs through projects focusing on circadian rhythms of CAM photosynthesis, efforts to engineer algal pyrenoids into plants, and a new project investigating Rubisco regulation in CAM plants.