Rubisco is (arguably) the most abundant protein on Earth. (LPP surely comes close, right?) It’s an enzyme that fixes CO₂ into sugars during photosynthesis. Unfortunately, as most people learn in school, Rubisco is inefficient. Sometimes it confuses O₂ for CO₂ and wastes
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@NikoMcCarty We are at the beginnings of true custom designed nanotech. Exciting time to be alive.
@NikoMcCarty Can this substitution be found in natural variation?
@NikoMcCarty replying so people can see this and maybe improve their timelines 😅
@NikoMcCarty Interesting
@NikoMcCarty @grok is this true?
@NikoMcCarty 75% faster than tobacco carrying a heterologous AtRubisco... but slower than the wt background? No plant biologist, so please correct me if I am wrong.
@NikoMcCarty This is groundbreaking work! I wouldn't be surprised if this leads to a Nobel Prize in the future.
@NikoMcCarty Gotta wonder if there is a broader ecological reason why plants have been reluctant to speed up rubisco themselves if all it takes are a few point mutations. Why evolve C4 architecture even?
@NikoMcCarty Lends itself to a sci-fi story about plans growing faster before our eyes and wildly out of control! But serious interesting research.
@NikoMcCarty Could this lead to trees that more efficiently utilize carbon dioxide leading to a stronger countering of human carbon dioxide release?
@NikoMcCarty "plants with M116L grew 75% faster than wildtype" is false. The paper found that tobacco plants ectopically expressing the rubisco large subunit from Arabidopsis all grew slower than WT tobacco, but adding the M116L mutation to the ectopic subunit shrank the gap. Fig. 6d:
@NikoMcCarty Could this help with carbon capture?
@NikoMcCarty Does this mean the plants grow faster or would they be more calorie dense? Or a combination of both?
@NikoMcCarty Super cool, but this is only one bottleneck in the pathway. Soon™.
@NikoMcCarty Is RuBP toxic to all cells or just E. coli?
@NikoMcCarty Very clever assay. 🧠
@NikoMcCarty Obligatory link to paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s414...
@NikoMcCarty Holy shit the implications are absolutely wild @brian
@NikoMcCarty This is sick