It seems a little odd that other crops have been cultivated to literally suit people’s tastes and interests, yet many trees…Seemingly not as much?
I recognize the growth cycles are much longer, in some(many?) cases far exceeding individual human lives, but whole civilizations have been relying on trees for ages. Have none, not even isolated parts of them, been stable enough to take on this experiment?
Yes there definitely have been major breeding exercises. I’ve toured some tissue culture facilities where they produce 10k seedlings a day of some tree species like redwood or Doug fir. I know that facilities breeding program focused on redwoods for decades and I met their geneticist.
Also, poplar has undergone major breeding for the biofuels industry to come up with species that have less hemi cellulose and lignin for easier digestion in bioreactors. There have also been some start ups claiming to “hack” photosynthesis also using, I believe, poplar (it’s like they don’t know what oxygen is).
That’s good to know, thanks!
I’ll have to look into bioreactors more. I’m also not sure about that last sentence, but then it sounds like maybe they don’t know what’s up either (or how to communicate it).
Basically, the molecular architecture of photo synthesis evolved in the absence of oxygen. It is severely inhibited by the presence of oxygen. Same goes for the enzymatic reaction to fix nitrogen. Basically oxygen fucked everything up
However oxygenic respiration is far more effective. You get way more atp bang for your rubisco sugar buck doing oxygenic respiration.
Likewise, you are splitting off oxygen as a terminal electron receptor in photosynthesis. So, shits just around.
Saying you are going to hack or solve photosynthesis us a great sales pitch. You can get a genetics company funded saying this, many have. But realistically, if anyone did “hack” or “solve” this (as if it’s a problem needing solving), it would be a disaster. In the time period when plants had figured out photosynthesis and lignin, and before wood decomposing fungus, we had glaciers basically to the tropics. Not to mention, well, oxygen. You just aren’t going to beat oxygen.