The benefits of photorespiratory bypasses: how can they work?

Bypassing the photorespiratory pathway is regarded as a way to increase carbon assimilation and, correspondingly, biomass production in C3 crops. Here, the benefits of three published photorespiratory bypass strategies are systemically explored using a systems-modeling approach. Our analysis shows that full decarboxylation of glycolate during photorespiration would decrease photosynthesis, because a large amount of the released CO2 escapes back to the atmosphere.

Identification of all steady states in large networks by logical analysis.

The goal of generalized logical analysis is to model complex biological systems, especially so-called regulatory systems, such as genetic networks. This theory is mainly characterized by its capacity to find all the steady states of a given system and the functional positive and negative circuits, which generate multistationarity and a cycle in the state sequence graph, respectively. So far, this has been achieved by exhaustive enumeration, which severely limits the size of the systems that can be analysed.