
Accelerating Photosynthesis - monort
http://rubyplants.com/
======
burfog
This 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.

------
IfOnlyYouKnew
Photosynthesis 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.

~~~
lm28469
Maybe its inefficiency is necessary. After all earth is a global eco system,
it's all about balance, everything is inter connected. What if Rubisco stopped
missing 2/3 and never missed instead ? What about the global CO2 levels ?
Oxygen ? More plants = more food for some animals &c.

This sounds like the typical junior developer starting working on a 20 years
old project saying 'Wait a minute, I can rewrite these 50k lines in 500 lines
of _insert tech of the day_' while ignoring 20 years of side effects, special
cases, well thought decisions, &c.

~~~
ben_w
> After all earth is a global eco system, it's all about balance, everything
> is inter connected.

Unfortunately, evolution doesn’t do balance, but rather local gradient
descent. Species reliant on one prey or one plant can and do over-consume
their food into extinction and then go extinct themselves. Even the oxygen we
breathe was a toxic waste product when the earth was young, and while
evolution found a pathway to consuming it, there’s never any guarantee of
that.

Evolution has had a long time to find solutions, so it shouldn’t be ignored,
but it’s also not a particularly smart system and it definitely isn’t directed
with long-term goals in mind — evolution can create birds, but not birds which
grow their own hypersonic ramjets.

~~~
beowulfey
Conversely, after the millions of years of evolution, it's not unreasonable to
think that creating a more efficient Rubisco could have happened spontaneously
in nature by mutation. Our logic suggests this would almost certainly provide
some benefit; and yet, nearly all Rubisco enzymes show roughly the same level
of efficiency.

To me, this implies some other limiting factor that we don't understand.

~~~
samatman
Highly multivariate random walks are excellent at finding local optima, and
poor at descending from those hills to find a higher one.

If something requires, say, five individually-deleterious mutations, each of
low probability, it's quite plausible that these will never align in a single
organism.

~~~
sdenton4
A localized entity responsible for the inefficiency doesn't sound like a local
minimum, though. It sound like a place where you should (eventually through
mutation) find the more efficient path.

There may be a more esoteric explanation... Imagine higher efficiency has a
price : plant lives a shorter life, and reproduces less. Then you want to fine
tune for the right amount of efficiency in your environment. Then it's
advantageous to have a single efficiency lever, instead of a dozen systems to
fine tune jointly... Just a guess - I know nothing about bio. :)

~~~
samatman
That is approximately why C4 photosynthesis hasn't swept the field and
replaced C3 entirely: it's an advantage in high-light, dry conditions, whereas
in wet, dark conditions, the more efficient use of ATP in C3 fixation provides
a comparative advantage.

FWIW I'm quite bullish on the type of research in the Fine Article; humans
have the ability to provide choice conditions to our crops, and so we can
maximize yield without (much) concern for the tradeoffs experienced in the
state of nature.

I'd predict, for example, that we'll have a C4 rice crop out of the lab and in
the field in ten years or less.

------
kidleroi
The 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
Ruby 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-n...](https://www.sublimesucculents.com/plant-for-thought-online-
nursery-interview/)

~~~
SamBam
Very 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.

------
coolplants
Plants 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.

~~~
chrisco255
There 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...](https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2020/01/08/heres-looking-at-you-co2/)

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.

~~~
mytailorisrich
I think that people tend to forget that CO2 levels have varied massively
throughout Earth's history and that they were quite higher than they are now
for a long time over plants' evolution, which might explain C3 v. C4 plants.

------
Gatsky
Something 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.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180301094857.htm)

------
zeofig
Neat site, but it would be good to have some information on who created it,
who did this research, and who (if anyone) funded it.

~~~
mkj
Team'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-n...](https://www.sublimesucculents.com/plant-for-thought-online-
nursery-interview/)

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?

------
gitanovic
Very 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
The 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
I wonder if carbon tax revenues should be ring-fenced, and spent solely on
endeavours just like the onein the article?

~~~
adrianN
A 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
This 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.

~~~
adrianN
Replacing fossil fuels with renewables doesn't require a very large decrease
in the standard of living. So we already have a technological solution for 80%
or so of the problem. Steel, cement, and long distance flying seem to be
tricky without releasing CO2, but we should probably only seriously worry
about those once we're well on our way with the things that can be replaced
without changing quality of life at all.

~~~
TeMPOraL
But that a) is only happening because technology lowers costs, changing the
economics of renewables so that it makes short-term, self-interest sense to
install them, and b) alone it still doesn't solve the problem.

------
pxndxx
Can't wait for a superplant to take over all ecosystems on earth! Hoping it's
tasty at least.

~~~
mnw21cam
There was a Stargate episode based on this particular threat. It had Richard
Dean Anderson going around shouting "It's a plant!"

------
pharke
Aren'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
If 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.

------
fasteddie31003
I'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.

------
grimwall
Beautiful work in automating the experiments and increasing the throughput,
very innovative approach.

------
baptou12
"Add Green & Infrared Antennae Proteins" => Nature will become sad to watch

------
carapace
[https://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.

------
hanuman
> 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.

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wilgertvelinga
I like the totally novel angle of attack on the CO2 problem!

~~~
the8472
Attempts 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/con...](http://photosynthome.irri.org/C4rice/index.php/component/content/article/19-about/56-what-
is-c4-rice) [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)

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alisson
Why forest can't be farms? They should not be opposite but complement each
other.

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ptah
why 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
Not sure if you read the news much, but we're not in the first part any more.

------
Noxmiles
Still no photosynthesis for humans... :(

