Abstract

Meeting global food demands in the coming decades will require innovative and sustainable solutions. Food crops require photosynthesis to harness abundant sunlight and store it into biomass via carbon fixation. However, photosynthesis is greatly limited by the availability of carbon dioxide. Interestingly, few plants are able to overcome this limitation and enhance their photosynthetic efficiency with a genetically encoded carbon concentrating mechanism, termed C4 photosynthesis. Transferring C4 photosynthesis into important non-C4 crops which use the ancestral and less efficient C3 photosynthesis has the potential to increase existing yields by more than 50%, while increasing water and nitrogen use efficiency. Harnessing the potential of C4 photosynthesis would be an incredible and sustainable solution to global food security and supply! The focus of this research is to explain how this mechanism will be transferred to important plants. This PhD project aims to study the inheritance and genetic basis of C4 photosynthesis through traditional gene mapping of novel C3 X C4 hybrids and studying gene expression determinates for select enzymes in the C4 biochemical pathway.