Scientists Develop Enzyme To Transform CO2 Into Food

Pretty much all life on Earth – plants, animals, humans – in large part, owe their entire existence to one microscopic protein.

RuBisCO, discovered by Sam Wildman in the 1940s, is essential to photosynthesis, and without it, plants would be unable to grow. I Photo: Ericlin1337 Wikimedia Commons

It’s called ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase, better known as RuBisCO, and it’s an enzyme, a biological machine that helps turn CO2 into energy, Jesse Nichols reported for Grist.

RuBisCO, discovered by Sam Wildman in the 1940s, is essential to photosynthesis, and without it, plants would be unable to grow.

Without RuBisCO, nearly all life on Earth would starve. However, the enzyme doesn’t perform well as the world gets hotter. Today, a global team of scientists is trying to accomplish something that evolution has previously failed to do: building a better RuBisCO.

Robbie Wilson is a research scientist and a self-described “rubiscologist” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He’s one of the scientists who see this evolutionary paradox as more of a challenge.

Wilson is part of an international collaboration aimed at evolving a better RuBisCO — not in a field, or even a greenhouse, but in a petri dish of bacteria.

With bacteria, scientists are able to speed this process up so they can actually design their own sequences in 25 minutes instead of waiting for random mutations. Wilson found a way to engineer bacteria to create and test thousands of different versions of RuBisCO in the lab.

Just like in the wild, where threats like predators and diseases push species to develop certain strengths, Wilson’s designed a special lab environment to push the bacteria to create better forms of RuBisCO using a second enzyme, called phosphoribulokinase (PRK).

This enzyme is an important part of photosynthesis in plants. PRK produces a chemical that RuBisCO needs to do its job — capturing carbon and turning it into food.