I study biochem/microbiology. Recently there’s been a new(?) discovery about photoresperation actually being benificial to the plant. Photo respiration is when photosynthesis accidentally happens to an oxygen which creates toxic molecules and was always thought of as wasteful. Billions of dollars have been spent to ‘solve’ this problem when, unsurprisingly, billions of years of evolution have solved it already.
IMO it’s why plants don’t do as well as we expect with high CO² concentrations (iirc)… the paper is behind a pay wall though, so I haven’t read the whole thing yet but the mechanism has unfortunately been called the Bloom Cycle and is set to confuse countless undergrads in the future.
I study biochem/microbiology. Recently there’s been a new(?) discovery about photoresperation actually being benificial to the plant. Photo respiration is when photosynthesis accidentally happens to an oxygen which creates toxic molecules and was always thought of as wasteful. Billions of dollars have been spent to ‘solve’ this problem when, unsurprisingly, billions of years of evolution have solved it already.
IMO it’s why plants don’t do as well as we expect with high CO² concentrations (iirc)… the paper is behind a pay wall though, so I haven’t read the whole thing yet but the mechanism has unfortunately been called the Bloom Cycle and is set to confuse countless undergrads in the future.