Many vital crops capture the sun’s energy in a surprisingly inefficient way. A borrowed trick or two could make them far more productive

Take a look around you. All the organic things you see, from your hands to the leather of your shoes to the wood in your table, are built of strings of carbon atoms. So too is the petrol in your car and the coal in your local power station. All this carbon came from thin air, from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

From termites to blue whales, virtually all life on Earth depends on plants’ ability to turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into food – and without the waste product, oxygen, you would be dead in minutes. You would think, then, that evolution would have honed the process to perfection over the past 2 billion years or so. Yet photosynthesis remains astonishingly inefficient in some ways.

In one respect, this is very good news. With the world’s population set to soar to 9 billion or so by 2050, we need to grow a lot more food. That’s a huge challenge, and as the climate changes, higher temperatures and more severe droughts and floods will make it even harder. We got a glimpse of what the future might be like this year, with drought in Russia and floods in Pakistan devastating crops.

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Improving photosynthesis itself could dramatically boost yields. The idea might sound like hubris, but there is no doubt it can be done – because some plants have already achieved it. Many have evolved the …