Wheat and rice plants waste up to a third of the energy they capture from sunlight on a metabolic glitch called photorespiration, and climate change will make it worse. This matters because photorespiration is a major drag on the yields of C3 crops—the staple grains that feed most of the world. The process occurs when the plant’s main carbon-fixing enzyme accidentally grabs oxygen instead of carbon dioxide, forcing the plant to burn energy to recycle the mistake. In hot, dry, bright conditions—exactly the conditions climate change is spreading—the problem intensifies. Simply eliminating photorespiration would break other plant functions, so the team is engineering a natural workaround: C2 photosynthesis, a carbon-concentrating mechanism that captures and recycles the CO₂ lost during photorespiration. If successful, the approach could make C3 crops far more productive under warmer, drier climates without sacrificing other metabolic needs. The team is currently fine-tuning the system in the oil crop *Camelina sativa*, a fast-growing testbed. Because C2 photosynthesis has evolved repeatedly across diverse plant families, the engineering strategy is grounded in a proven natural blueprint. The work is fundamental science with a clear practical target: boosting yield stability in the crops that underpin global food supply.
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Our food security is at risk. Within the next 30 years, the human population is expected to reach nearly 10 billion, requiring a doubling of crop production. However, the current trajectory of crop yield improvements will not meet these needs, making new agricultural innovations paramount to ensure future food security. Improving photosynthetic efficiency is a promising, yet largely untapped route to enhance crop yields. Our dominant crops (e.g., rice, wheat) use C3 photosynthesis, such that any improvement to this system would substantially impact food security. Under warm, arid, and bright environments, C3 plants suffer from an energetically-costly metabolic process called photorespiration. Photorespiration is a major factor limiting productivity in C3 plants and it will only get worse with the warm temperatures accompanying climate change. If we could find a way to eliminate photorespiration therefore, we could more than double rates of photosynthesis under climate change. However, eliminating photorespiration all together would impact other plant metabolic functions. Therefore, the ideal scenario would be to find a way to maintain photorespiration but minimise its carbon losses. Engineering C2 photosynthesis into C3 crops is the clear solution. C2 photosynthesis is a simple CO2 concentrating mechanism that captures, concentrates, and re-assimilates CO2 released by photorespiration. It is, in short, a natural CO2 recycling mechanism. Although only recently discovered in the early 1980s, the C2 mode of photosynthesis has repeatedly evolved across diverse plant lineages, including four crop families (Poaceae, Brassicaceae, Asteraceae, Amaranthaceae). This FLF has established the world's first research program specifically dedicated to engineering the rare C2 mode of photosynthesis into important C3 food and bioenergy crops to sustainably improve yield and environmental resilience. The renewal phase will be dedicate to fine-tuning our C2 engineering approach, focusing on the important oil crop Camelina sativa. Together, this robust research program is developing an impactful, yet feasible, C2 engineering strategy via four work packages: Work Package 1. Enhance the photosynthetic capacity of the Camelina BS Work Package 2. Confine GDC expression to the BS in Camelina sativa GDC Work Package 3. Engineer full C2 trait in Camelina sativa. Work Package 4. Characterise C2 Camelina lines under controlled environment conditions Together, the proposed innovative research program aims to increase Camelina yields and stability under our future unstable climates by building upon the novel crop improvement program started during the initial FLF phase.
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