A fast way to convert carbon

Researchers have come up with a biochemical pathway that converts carbon dioxide into useful organic compounds more efficiently than plants can.

A team led by Tobias Erb at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany, assembled a series of chemical reactions using 17 redesigned enzymes from 9 different organisms. The main enzyme used by plants in photosynthesis makes the process of CO₂ fixation relatively slow, but using other enzymes from bacteria, plants and humans, the researchers developed a quicker and more energy-efficient pathway.

This process could have many applications, such as boosting CO₂ fixation in photosynthetic organisms, the authors say.

Science 354, 900–904 (2016)