Increased photosynthetic efficiency is one of the desired plant character in present day agriculture. It is well known that C4 plants more superior than C3 plants in terms of photosynthetic efficiency. One of the major attribute in this regard is the occurrence of kranz anatomy in C4 plants. There are other attributes as well. Please discuss in detail how to achieve the same charactistics in C3 plants.
What I do is increase the organic matter content of the top 5 cm. of the soil, and add a 5 cm layer of mulch on top. That is for non-aquatic crops, probably not useful for rice cultivation, but perhaps wheat would benefit.
Why that increases efficiency I do not know, but aside from fertilizing a plant, it probably increases efficiency up to 500% or more, than the control plants that do not have the organic matter and mulch added.
Try it, and if you will like it, please cite me in your scientific papers if you prove that this is correct., or add me as a co-author?
A robust set of characters should be engineered by biotech, but then in case of success you got C4 crops not an improvement of C3 but a change. A main question is why do not use extant C4 like maize. For infos there is an international team working on rice , http://c4rice.irri.org/. C3 night respiration and carbon turnover is optimal and forests exists thanks to it
Thanks to all for showing interests in the discussion and sharing valuable links!
As we know the leaf anatomy is the main factor for this condition, that in C4 plants caused decreasing of photorespiration because the Calvin cycle is performed in the internal region, that the chloroplast uptake the released CO2 from the four carbon acid and builds up a large excess of CO2 over O2 around rubsco and facilitating the assimilation of CO2 through the Calvin cycle, this feature is not found in C3 plants, you can study the factors that decrease the photorespiration (increase CO2 concentration and decrease O2 in protect culture may give you the best result)
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