Research Team Models Connection Between Enzyme Activity and Yields for the First Time

Jul 12, 2024

A team from the University of Illinois has developed a modeling framework connecting enzyme activity related to photosynthesis to yield. This is the first time a model has tied the dynamic photosynthetic pathways directly to crop growth.

"A previous model coupled data from the genetic, metabolic, and leaf levels, but we needed to connect the metabolic level to the greater canopy level," said Yufeng He, a postdoctoral researcher in the Matthews Group at Illinois. "The new model allows us to examine how changes in enzyme activities can affect yield by better connecting the environmental variation experienced by the crops in the field to the metabolic processes."

This work is part of Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), an international research project that is engineering crops to be more productive by improving photosynthesis, the natural process all plants use to convert sunlight into energy and yields.

In a recent study published in in silico Plants, He and others show how their model will positively impact the ability of scientists to accurately simulate crop growth. Previously, scientists wanting to simulate field experiments had to treat the process of photosynthesis, and the associated enzyme activities, as if the plant were in steady-state. For anyone who has been in a crop field, that is a very unrealistic measure.

"Plants don't exist in a stable environment. We can use this work to study the sensitivity of enzymes under different environmental conditions," said Megan Matthews, principal investigator for the RIPE Project and assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at Illinois. "The model will allow us to see which photosynthetic enzymes are limiting in different environments, and how they can lead to yield gain under long-term climatic conditions."

The model's ability to understand which enzymes can be limiting and connect this to expected yield comes from representing photosynthesis as a detailed series of dynamic enzyme reactions, rather than a simplified representation of a few reactions at steady-state. An additional benefit of this model is that it could be used to explore non-steady-state photosynthetic responses, such as when shade from cloud cover or other leaves moving in the wind can cause a plant to start or stop photosynthesis throughout a day. Previous models that did treat photosynthesis as a dynamic process weren't able to scale up to crop growth at the field level.

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Video: Spring 2026 weather outlook for Wisconsin; What an early-arriving El Niño could mean

Northeast Wisconsin is a small corner of the world, but our weather is still affected by what happens across the globe.

That includes in the equatorial Pacific, where changes between El Niño and La Niña play a role in the weather here -- and boy, have there been some abrupt changes as of late.

El Niño and La Niña are the two phases of what is collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO for short. These are the swings back and forth from unusually warm to unusually cold sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean along the equator.

Since this past September, we have been in a weak La Niña, which means water temperatures near the Eastern Pacific equator have been cooler than usual. That's where we're at right now.

Even last fall, the long-term outlook suggested a return to neutral conditions by spring and potentially El Niño conditions by summer.

But there are some signs this may be happening faster than usual, which could accelerate the onset of El Niño.

Over the last few weeks, unusually strong bursts of westerly winds farther west in the Pacific -- where sea surface temperatures are warmer than average -- have been observed. There is a chance that this could accelerate the warming of those eastern Pacific waters and potentially push us into El Niño sooner than usual.

If we do enter El Nino by spring -- which we'll define as the period of March, April and May -- there are some long-term correlations with our weather here in Northeast Wisconsin.

Looking at a map of anomalously warm weather, most of the upper Great Lakes doesn't show a strong correlation, but in general, the northern tiers of the United States do tend to lean to that direction.

The stronger correlation is with precipitation. El Niño conditions in spring have historically come with a higher risk of very dry weather over that time frame, so this will definitely be a transition we'll have to watch closely as we move out of winter.