Green carbon for food security: Genome to phenome

Green Carbon is the organic ‘living’ carbon stored in biosphere, captured through photosynthesis, a process critically dependent on the activity of RubisCO – a key enzyme in the global carbon cycle, arguably the most abundant protein on Earth, yet enormously inefficient. Over the last 600Mya, nature has optimized ways to overcome this inefficiency, by evolving methods of carbon acquisition for photosynthesis, collectively called the Carbon Concentrating Mechanisms (CCM). This talk describes our work on spatio-temporal complex networks of green algal CCM, a decadal vision for improving RubisCO efficiency towards higher biomass production, and in turn, food security.