Adapting cyanobacterial bicarbonate transporters for application in crop improvement

Marine cyanobacteria are major contributors to global photosynthetic primary productivity, yet CO2 acquisition processes are still poorly understood. We will ascertain more about structure-function relationships of two classes of cyanobacterial bicarbonate transporters, known as SbtA and BicA, with emphasis on discovering the post-translational controls that regulate the activation state of these proteins and direct kinetic properties of each pump. This information is critical to our goal of rationally redesigning BicA and SbtA variants that will be active in plants, thereby contributing to the applied objective of engineering crop plants with improved water-use efficiency.