A genetic tweak keeps potatoes efficient in the heat
When a scorching heat wave struck Illinois in June 2022, crop physiologist Katherine Meacham-Hensold hoped her team's new bioengineered potato variety would survive it—but she was astonished by just how well it thrived. The plant yielded 30 percent more of its large red tubers than a normal, unengineered plant in the same conditions, according to a recent study in Global Change Biology. "This study is particularly noteworthy because it shows real benefits in a field setting with a staple crop," says biochemist Edward Smith of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the research. "There's no reason this technology couldn't be applied to more crops." To engineer the potato, Meacham-Hensold and her colleagues at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign focused on an inconvenient heat-triggered process in most plants called photorespiration, in which a key photosynthesis enzyme known as RuBisCO gets sidetracked and begins making a toxic by-product. RuBisCO molecules need to bind to carbon dioxide to carry out photosynthesis,…