RESUMEN
Sophie Johnson recounts her experience completing a remote internship at Biology Open, hosted by Editor-in-Chief Steve Kelly. Sophie is a third year BBSRC Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) PhD student studying plant vein development at the University of Oxford. She was keen to get some experience in academic publishing and so carried out a PIPS (Professional Internships for PhD Students) placement working with Biology Open.
RESUMEN
Multiple proof-of-principle experiments and successful field trials have demonstrated that engineering photosynthesis is a viable strategy for improving crop yields. Advances to engineering technologies have accelerated efforts to improve photosynthesis, generating a large volume of published literature: this Review therefore aims to highlight the most promising results from the period February 2021 to January 2022. Recent research has demonstrated the importance of understanding the impact of changing climates on photosynthesis to ensure that proposed engineering strategies are resilient to climate change. Encouragingly, there have been several reports of strategies that have benefits at temperatures higher than current ambient conditions. There has also been success in engineering synthetic bypass pathways, providing support for the feasibility of a synthetic biology approach. Continued developments in all areas of engineering photosynthesis will be necessary for sustainably securing sufficient crop yields for the future. This article has an associated First Person interview with the first author of the paper.