Researchers study the effect of boosting photosynthetic processes at the canopy level and if it could increase yields
Photosynthesis is the process by which plants absorb sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and convert them to oxygen and energy in the form of sugar. It gives plants the means to grow and produce food.
A team of scientists from the University of Illinois has modelled a way to improve photosynthesis and increase soybean growth under realistic climate conditions.
Megan Matthews, assistant professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering, said most attention on improving photosynthesis so far has looked at how much the maximum rate of photosynthesis has increased at the leaf level.
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“We wanted to look at how we might expect soybean to respond if the increases they’ve achieved in tobacco could also be achieved in soybean.”
She said in a news release that her team studied the impacts of seasonal climate conditions at the field level on improvements of photosynthesis. They used realistic climate inputs to run the models to show how the improvements would vary with different climates.
The team used the Soybean-BioCro model (a crop growth model) that used data collected from a two-year period and validated against data from four years of experiments at the university’s SoyFACE facility.
SoyFACE (Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment) is a complex for growing crops under production field conditions in an atmosphere with higher carbon dioxide and ozone levels, higher temperatures and altered soil water availability.
Its design allows for controlled atmospheric changes on test crops and soils to monitor productivity and find solutions leading to crop improvement in the face of global warming and all the variables of climate change.
The BioCro model simulated a 10-layer canopy photosynthesis of sunlit and shaded leaves. It then calculated all the carbon from that process into biomass, all of which was estimated at an hourly progression throughout the growing season. The objective was to discover the effect of boosting the photosynthetic processes at the canopy level and monitor if the effects could lead to higher yields.
“There are a lot of factors that can influence photosynthesis, including how much light the canopy is intercepting at a given time, as well as the humidity and temperature, which not only change throughout a day and growing season but can also vary within the crop canopy as well,” she said. “Other factors like how much water and nitrogen are available to the crops also play important roles. It’s the combination of these and other factors that influence how much photosynthesis occurs at any given time throughout a crop canopy.”
According to the news release, they found that the overall returns in photosynthesis and yield were affected when plants were simulated in a high CO2 environment. In addition, increased photosynthesis and increased yield depended on climatic conditions at different stages of soybean growth.
“Temperature especially plays an important role in determining how long different crop developmental stages will last,” she said. “With soybean, the day length also plays an important role, especially when it comes to the timing of flowering, which is the start of the reproductive stages. The length of the different developmental phases plays a role in how/where carbon is being allocated and for how long. During the vegetative stages, a lot of the carbon being fixed through photosynthesis will go towards leaves and stems. With a longer vegetative period, this can create a larger canopy, which could be good or bad depending on how much sunlight is able to penetrate the canopy during the reproductive stages. Most of the carbon fixed during the reproductive stages will be allocated towards seeds/grains, so the length of these stages and the amount of photosynthesis that occurs during these stages can have a large impact on yields.”
The research was part of the RIPE project (Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency) led by the University of Illinois to engineer crops to be more productive by improving.
The findings were published in the journal Field Crops Research.
