Exploring Rubisco's Efficiency: Can We Improve Photosynthesis?

Photosynthesis is a complex process, with complex terms. We’ll try to keep it simple.

Rubisco plays a key role in the Calvin cycle, which is the part of photosynthesis that transforms a CO2 molecule into what’s called GP3. GP3 then goes on to form glucose and other carbohydrates.

Rubisco facilitates carbon fixation by enabling inorganic CO2 to react with a plant sugar, creating organic molecules. This is the very beginning of the photosynthesis process - without rubisco, nothing happens.

Rubisco can also perform dual functions. As well as carboxylation above, it can perform oxylation when it reacts with oxygen instead of CO2. This leads to photorespiration, which is a less efficient process than photosynthesis.

As it occurs in the wild, rubisco is a plentiful food source for vegetarian animals all over the world. It is a highly nutritious protein. However, it has always been unable to be digested by humans. Until now.

Leaft Foods is innovating how rubisco can be taken from green leaves to create a new, sustainable source of protein.

Rubisco is somewhat of a bottleneck in the process of photosynthesis. It plays a key role in getting things started, and nothing else can happen until it’s finished that role.

Challenges include:

• It can be slow
• If rubisco grabs hold of oxygen molecules instead of carbon dioxide (i.e. performs oxylation instead of carboxylation), it produces a waste product and reduces the efficiency of photosynthesis 
• There’s more oxygen in the air than carbon dioxide, meaning a higher chance of oxylation rather than carboxylation
• It takes a lot of energy to fix carbon dioxide into sugars, so the returns can be smaller
  

The net result of those (and other) challenges means slower crop growth and a lower yield. 

Which is where Leaft Foods is looking to make a difference. By extracting rubisco using food-safe technology, Leaft Foods is looking to harness the power of rubisco and put it to work in a way that overcomes these challenges. 

The opportunity is to supercharge rubisco’s role in photosynthesis, ultimately boosting plant growth and producing more food for the world.

This is a novel approach to generating sustainable protein, fuelled in part by Leaft Foods’ innovative technology and scientific breakthroughs that enable it to happen.

The benefits of rubisco are two-fold: it can be harnessed to promote production of plant proteins, and it can also be consumed in its own right, once it’s been extracted by Leaft Foods’ technology.

According to The Washington Post, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation believes rubisco is a nearly “ideal” protein for human consumption. 

It is an extremely rich protein, with an amino acid profile similar to high protein foods like beef or egg whites. It’s also non allergenic, unlike other plant proteins like soy, wheat and peas. 

Its abundance also sets rubisco apart. These factors underline the significance of its potential to produce sustainable protein to feed the world.

By leveraging rubisco better in food production, the impacts could be seen on many levels:

• Improving dairy productivity and food security
• Reducing the carbon footprint of agriculture and traditional protein sources
• Minimizing the impact of agriculture on the soil
• Promoting consumer benefits by increasing production of high nutrition foods
• Greater provision of neutral tasting, versatile protein for consumption
  

These benefits are what spur the Leaft Foods mission of creating food systems that provide for humanity in partnership with the environment.

Efficiently extracting and processing rubisco comes with several challenges:

• It is a low yield protein, found in relatively small amounts 
• It comes in multiple forms, often mixed with other proteins, presenting purification issues
• It can degrade quickly once extracted
• It can be an expensive process

In the long term, there are high hopes for rubisco to be a prominent protein in sustainable food production.

One reason for the excitement is because of the range of applications rubisco has, as mentioned above. And we are still only at the beginning - there will likely be more innovations in rubisco and other sustainable protein sources.

While rubisco may not be a common protein today, in the future people could have multiple encounters with it every day.

Leaft Foods is at the forefront of rubisco innovation, driven by a goal to increase the production of food while decreasing its impact on the planet.

Unlocking the power of rubisco on a greater scale could be huge for sustainable food production around the world.

As a highly abundant, highly influential protein in plant growth, the potential benefits of being able to supercharge rubisco’s efficiency are significant.

It is a highly ambitious, innovative project, and Leaft Foods is at the heart of this pioneering new field, intersecting food production, food technology and sustainability.

All consumers have a role to play. By finding out about sustainable protein and considering the environmental impacts of our diets, we can make informed decisions that ultimately benefit the planet.

Find out more about Leaft Foods; how the journey started and how much of a game-changer rubisco could be.