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Department of Plant Sciences

 
A concentrated issue for the Griffiths' group

A special issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany represents the outputs of the Carbon Concentrating Mechanism Symposium (CCM9) held in Cambridge in August 2016.

The issue contains 4 papers from the Physiological Ecology Group, including an editorial by Howard Griffiths, Moritz Meyer and Ros Rickaby (University of Oxford). They posit that a major selective pressure for the origins of marine algal carbon concentrating mechanisms occurred around 400 million years ago, when the relative solubilities of atmospheric O2 and CO2 would have produced equimolar concentrations in solution being presented to Rubisco. Thus, inadvertently, the rise of the land plants and burial of carbon on land, increased the selection pressures in aquatic environments for algae to develop mechanisms to turbocharge Rubisco.