Genetically altered photosynthesis grows more food without loss of quality

In 10 seconds? Researchers have managed to increase yields by up to 20% in soybeans after they successfully genetically altered them to make photosynthesis more efficient. On top of that, they did not see any loss of quality in the crops.

What’s the breakthrough here? Photosynthesis is the natural process that plants carry out to make their own energy from sunlight. Despite the importance of this process, it is highly inefficient and just a fraction of the sunlight that reaches a plant ends up fuelling its growth. To help increase crop production, researchers have been working for more than a decade to improve the rate of photosynthesis. In this case, researchers managed to genetically alter soybeans to improve an aspect of photosynthesis, called the VPZ construct, which helped improve efficiency substantially.