Researched
C4 Photosynthesis Discovered
Marshall Hatch and Roger Slack worked out in 1966 how maize and sugarcane concentrate carbon dioxide, a shortcut that saves water and works well in heat.
Open in the interactive tree →In the 1950s and early 1960s Hugo Kortschak and Yuri Karpilov found that some plants first make four-carbon acids, malate and aspartate, instead of the three-carbon compound found in most plants. In 1966 Marshall Hatch and Roger Slack in Australia worked out the whole pathway, called C4. C4 plants pump carbon dioxide around the enzyme Rubisco, so at 30 degrees Celsius they lose about 277 water molecules per carbon dioxide fixed, against about 833 for C3 grasses. Only about 3% of plant species are C4, but they fix roughly 23% of the carbon on land and include maize, sugarcane and sorghum.
Prerequisites
- Photosynthesis Discovered1779The C4 route is a second way of doing the first step of photosynthesis.
Unlocks
- C4 Rice / Better PhotosynthesisopenEngineering rice to work like maize copies the C4 pathway worked out in 1966.