Biologists have identified a new gene in California poplar trees (Populus trichocarpa) — named BOOSTER — that enhances photosynthesis and can boost tree height.
Transgenic hybrid poplar with increased expression levels of BSTR enhanced photosynthesis efficiency and biomass under greenhouse conditions. Image credit: Feyissa et al., doi: 10.1016/j.devcel.2024.11.002.
“Historically, a lot of studies have focused on steady-state photosynthesis where every condition is kept constant,” said co-senior authors Dr. Steven Burgess, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“However, this is not representative of the field environment in which light can vary all the time.”
“Over the last few years, these dynamic processes have been considered to be more important and are not well understood.”
In the new study, Dr. Burgess and his colleagues focused on poplar trees since they’re a fast-growing crop and a leading candidate for making biofuels and bioproducts.
They sampled approximately 1,000 trees in outdoor research plots and analyzed their physical characteristics and genetic makeup to perform a genome-wide association study (GWAS).
They used the GWAS population to look for candidate genes that had been linked to photosynthetic quenching, a process that regulates how quickly plants adjust between the Sun and shade and dissipate excess energy from too much Sun to avoid damage.
One of the genes, BOOSTER (BSTR), was unusual because it is unique to poplar and although it is in the nuclear genome contains a sequence which originated from the chloroplast.
“We discovered that this gene was able to increase the Rubisco content and subsequent photosynthetic activity, resulting in taller polar plants when grown in greenhouse conditions,” the authors said.
“In field conditions, they found that genotypes with higher expression of BOOSTER were up to 37% taller, increasing biomass per plant.”
The researchers also inserted BOOSTER in the model plant Arabidopsis, resulting in an increase in biomass and seed production.
This finding indicates the wider applicability of BOOSTER to potentially trigger higher yields in other plants.
“It is an exciting first step, although these are small-scale experiments, and there is a lot of work to be done, if we can reproduce the results on a large scale, this gene has the potential to increase biomass production in crops,” Dr. Burgess said.
“Next steps in the research could encompass testing in other bioenergy and food plants, recording plant productivity in varying growing conditions to analyze long-term success.”
“We will also be investigating the other genes that were identified in the GWAS study that could contribute to crop improvement.”
The findings appear this week in the journal Developmental Cell.
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Biruk A. Feyissa et al. An orphan gene BOOSTER enhances photosynthetic efficiency and plant productivity. Developmental Cell, published online December 3, 2024; doi: 10.1016/j.devcel.2024.11.002