In an article recently published in Nature Communications, researchers from INGEBI-CONICET, CEFOBI-CONICET and Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) propose rewinding the reductionist evolution of the chloroplast genome to increase crop yields.

The development of more productive crops that allow more sustainable production schemes will be essential to achieve food security in the coming decades. A central process of evolution in plant organisms has been the transfer of genes initially located in the chloroplast genome to the nuclear genome. In the article, titled “Homecoming: rewinding the reductive evolution of the chloroplast genome for increasing crop yields”, the authors propose reversing this process as a new strategy to improve disease resistance and photosynthesis in future crops.

Homecoming: rewinding the reductive evolution of the chloroplast genome for increasing crop yields
Briardo Llorente*, María Eugenia Segretin*, Estefanía Giannini, Celina Lobais, Marcelo E. Juárez, Ian T. Paulsen & Nicholas E. White*
Nature Communications volume 12, Article number: 6734 (2021)
* corresponding authors

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