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IMAGE: Engineering of glycolyl-CoA carboxylase (GCC), the key enzyme of the TaCo pathway. GCC was developed on the scaffold of a naturally occurring propionyl-CoA carboxylase (WT). Rational design led to the...
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Credit: Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology/Scheffen
Photorespiration is a highly energy consuming process in plants that leads to the release of previously fixed CO2. Thus, engineering this metabolic process is a key approach for improvement of crop yield and for meeting the challenge of ever-rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Researchers led by Tobias Erb from the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany, have now succeeded in engineering the TaCo pathway, a synthetic photorespiratory bypass. This new-to-nature metabolic connection opens up new possibilities of CO2 fixation and the production of value-added compounds.