Hello, I'm Lauren Richardson, and this is the A16Z Biojournal club.

This is our podcast where we cover recent scientific advances, why they matter, and how to take them from proof of principle to practice.

In today's episode, I'm talking with BioDeal team partner

Judy Savitskaya, a resident expert in all things synthetic biology.

We cover recent research that seeks to improve the processes of photosynthesis and carbon fixation and how these advances could one day be used to improve crop growth and carbon sequestration and plants.

First, a quick biochem refresher. During photosynthesis,

also known as the light cycle, light energy is captured by chlorophyll and then pass through a series

of reactions to the energy-rich chemical cofactors,

ATP and NADP. These co-factors are then used by the carbon fixation cycle or dark cycle to drive the capture and conversion of carbon dioxide into more complex carbon

molecules like glucose. Plants and other phototrophs use these two processes to turn sunlight

and carbon dioxide from the air into organic matter.

These are hugely powerful processes that have generated essentially all the organic matter on Earth,

from the wooden trees to our own bodies.

But these processes also aren't perfect,

and scientists have for decades

been trying to make them more efficient.

The two articles that we discussed today

were both published in the journal Science and are both from the lab of Tobias Herb at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology.

The first article published in 2016 develops a synthetic pathway for the fixation of carbon dioxide in vitro.

The second article, which was published in May, combines this synthetic carbon fixation pathway with the natural

photosynthetic pathway isolated from spinach to create a synthetic

chloroplast. This combination of natural and synthetic components to improve the efficiency of these pathways has a number of potential applications, including engineering our crops to grow faster.

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