Cornfield under sun (IMAGE)
Caption
A summer’s worth of missed opportunities to harvest light can cost cornfields, and those who farm them, a sizable portion of the potential harvests they yield in the fall. New findings from Nebraska’s Kasia Glowacka and colleagues could help change that. The team has identified genes that regulate the photosynthetic equivalent of a surge protector — a mechanism designed to help plants mitigate damage driven by sudden spikes of high-intensity light. Breeding those genes into lines of corn could speed the rate at which the safeguard switches off, ultimately allowing them to waste less of the sunlight that they transform into food via photosynthesis.
Credit
Shutterstock / Kasia Glowacka / Scott Schrage
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