RuBisCO Engineering for Climate-Resilient Agriculture with Robbie Wilson

On this episode of The Climate Biotech Podcast, Paul Reginato is joined by Robbie Wilson, a research scientist in the Department of Chemistry at MIT, where he leads the RuBisCO engineering effort in Matt Shoulders' lab. Robbie has spent his career working on RuBisCO – the enzyme that fixes CO2 –across labs in Australia, Germany, and the United States. He co-leads the Enhanced Photosynthesis in Crops (EPiC) Project, which applies directed evolution to RuBisCO with the goal of moving improved variants from the lab into field-relevant crops.RuBisCO is present in all autotrophic organisms, including plants, where it catalyzes the conversion of CO2 into molecules that can be used throughout metabolism.  Almost every carbon atom in your body passed through it at some point. It is also famously slow, and the version inside plants is so structurally fragile it needs a dedicated team of helper proteins just to fold correctly. During his postdoc in Germany, Robbie and a colleague figured out exactly which helpers were needed, making it possible for the first time to grow and engineer plant RuBisCO inside ordinary lab bacteria. That unlocked the door to testing thousands of variants quickly.Robbie's work also points to why a faster RuBisCO is not necessarily a better one. The fastest versions found in nature live in places like hydrothermal vents where CO2 is abundant, and they perform poorly inside a leaf where CO2 is scarce. The more useful questions are about CO2 affinity, the trade-off between activity and stability that keeps the enzyme from being pushed too far, and oxygen interference. Oxygen interference is when RuBisCO mistakenly catalyzes a reaction with oxygen instead of CO2, an inefficiency which wastes the plant's energy and gets worse as temperatures climb. Reducing that oxygen sensitivity is a central focus of MIT’s EPiC Project, and is a high-leverage opportunity to protect crop yields in a warming world.Listen to learn why heat waves are increasingly dangerous for staple crops like wheat, how machine learning is reshaping the way RuBisCO engineers choose which mutations to test, and what stands between today's lab results and a real improvement in the field. Send us Fan Mail