THE excitement in his voice is palpable as Sydney University scientist Dr Yu Heng Lau explains the project he and his team are working on.
The researchers are modifying plant enzymes and trying to create the building blocks on which crops will grow quicker, easier and bear more bountiful results.
It’s an ambitious project.
Food security is something the majority of the world’s population simply do not have and Dr Lau’s project aims to not only address those issues but benefit growers as reliance on fertilisers would decrease.
The Australian Research Council (ARC) has seen merit in the cause too. The team have just won a $692,000 grant to help further their research into ways to increase agricultural productivity.
The project involves photosynthesis and Rubisco, a family of enzymes that take carbon dioxide and transfer it into organic matter.
He said his team studied ways algae used this enzyme and found it had a way of utilising Rubisco incredibly well.
Dr Lau is a man whose world consists of mathematical formulas and scientific methodologies not easily understood verbatim by the layperson, so he explained the process using analogies.
“Algae has a really neat way of making this enzyme better, it basically uses a little protein structure,” he explained.
“Imagine you have a house and that house has more than one room, you cook in your kitchen not in your living room.“It’s a similar thing, you don’t want to do your carbon dioxide reaction just randomly anywhere ... there is a little room for it inside the algae that does it.
“We are interested in that shape that is built like a room.
“We are similar to architects but instead of building a room in a house, we are building a room made of proteins inside living organisms.
“We are interested in how we can shape this room and algae do this, they know Rubisco is very inefficient, so they build this room and say ‘just concentrate on your work and do the very best you can’ by giving it all the right conditions and excluding any distracting factors.
“But we don’t want to grow algae, what we would like to do is take those more efficient Rubiscos and more efficient houses for Rubiscos and see how they work inside plants because plants don’t quite do that, they seem to be slower and have more complicated ways to give it the space it needs.
“Our project works with simple proteins that form cages that can be the perfect home for Rubisco.”
He said the first part of photosynthesis was ‘super important’ as that’s where the world’s carbon comes from.
“Because every plant does this, if we can make Rubisco even one percent better across a commercially relevant crop, you’d have a huge increase in productivity and efficiency,” he said.
“This is the Holy Grail, and something plant and agricultural scientists have been working on for decades.
“Plant scientists at Australian National University have a long history of working with Rubisco. It is the most abundant enzyme in the world but at the same time rather inefficient in relation to other enzymes.
“It does a very challenging energy intensive process because carbon dioxide is really hard to convert into other things.
“Scientists have been looking for ways to make Rubisco better and that’s where our project comes in.”
Dr Lau said his team was not alone when it came to scientific agricultural research and that there were a lot of people on ‘every level’ working to make things more productive and beneficial to farmers and the economy.
“I’m not saying there will be an immediate change because we are at the very early stages of research,” he said.
“Our work is a link in the chain and possible thanks to fundamental science and research into agriculture done decades earlier.
“The results from this project may not bear fruit until a decade or more into the future and knowing this we are doing everything we can to create a future where agricultural productivity is greatly improved from what it is today.”