Missing Genomic Resources for the Next Generation of Environmental Risk Assessment.

Environmental risk assessment traditionally relies on a wide range of in vivo testing to assess the potential hazards of chemicals in the environment. These tests are often time-consuming and costly and can cause test organisms' suffering. Recent developments of reliable low-cost alternatives, both in vivo- and in silico-based, opened the door to reconsider current toxicity assessment.

A synthetic C4 shuttle via the β-hydroxyaspartate cycle in C3 plants.

Plants depend on the enzyme ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (Rubisco) for CO fixation. However, especially in C3 plants, photosynthetic yield is reduced by formation of 2-phosphoglycolate, a toxic oxygenation product of Rubisco, which needs to be recycled in a high-flux-demanding metabolic process called photorespiration. Canonical photorespiration dissipates energy and causes carbon and nitrogen losses.

The impact of synthetic biology for future agriculture and nutrition.

Global food production needs to be increased by 70% to meet demands by 2050. Current agricultural practices cannot cope with this pace and furthermore are not ecologically sustainable. Innovative solutions are required to increase productivity and nutritional quality.

Mechanistic understanding of photorespiration paves the way to a new green revolution.

Photorespiration is frequently considered a wasteful and inefficient process. However, mutant analysis demonstrated that photorespiration is essential for recycling of 2-phosphoglycolate in C and C land plants, in algae, and even in cyanobacteria operating carboxysome-based carbon (C) concentrating mechanisms. Photorespiration links photosynthetic C assimilation with other metabolic processes, such as nitrogen and sulfur assimilation, as well as C metabolism, and it may contribute to balancing the redox poise between chloroplasts, peroxisomes, mitochondria and cytoplasm.

In Vitro Analysis of Metabolite Transport Proteins.

The photorespiratory cycle is distributed over four cellular compartments, the chloroplast, peroxisomes, cytoplasm, and mitochondria. Shuttling of photorespiratory intermediates between these compartments is essential to maintain the function of photorespiration. Specific transport proteins mediate the transport across biological membranes and represent important components of the cellular metabolism.