rubisco

What:

"So, RuBisCO is like an old blind cook. It can't tell the difference between salt and sugar. Sometimes he uses salt, sometimes uses sugar, and obviously, the cake is going to be really different. The sugar ones are great, that's the CO2, the salt ones, really bad. So, what C4 does is it employs as a helper and this helper is a different enzyme. It lives in a different room and he can tell the difference. It only takes the sugar off the shelf. So, it only takes carbon dioxide, leaves the oxygen, and he passes the sugar to the cook in the other room where he's just happily away making cakes. And because he haven't got the option anymore, he only uses the sugar. So you only get good cakes and so, you only get the beneficial reaction."

Writer: Helen Woodfield

LCC:

Where:

Date: Dec 6 2014 2:11 PM

What:

"Rubisco is like other chloroplast macromolecular complexes in that its sub- units are encoded by both the nuclear and chloroplast genomes "

Writer: David Stern

LCC:

Where:

Date: Dec 6 2014 2:12 PM

What:

"The situation with rubisco is like QWERTY" A Nice discussion of the molecular evolution of this enzyme.

Writer: Joseph E. Armstrong

LCC:

Where:

Date: Dec 6 2014 2:14 PM

What:

"I find it amazing and kind of funny that Rubisco is like the most useless thing ever that just barely functions enough to kinda do its job but plants never got rid of it and instead we just have mountains and mountains of this barely-useful molecule all over the planet, more than ANY OTHER PROTEIN EVER because plants have just stuck with it and kept making it and making it at huge rates to compensate for how almost-useless it is "

Writer: Not Stated

LCC:

Where:

Date: Dec 6 2014 2:16 PM

What:

"Imagine that RuBisCo is like a high-performance car that can go 100 mph when you give it high-octane gasoline (petrol). But now, only low-octane gas is available, so the car can only go 50 mph max.

By steadily increasing the CO2 available to green plants, we are enabling RuBisCo to "fix" CO2 into sugars at a faster and faster rate, resulting in improved photosynthetic productivity of the plants. "

Writer: plantguy

LCC:

Where:

Date: Dec 6 2014 2:18 PM

What:

"Rubisco is like a blobby doughnut (round with a small hole in the middle) made out of eight separate protein chains and is unusual in being a soluble enzyme that has only extremely recently been successfully re- folded in a test tube. This tells us that the structure of Rubisco needs to be extremely precise in order for it to work. (Most other soluble enzymes can be treated a lot more roughly and are generally easy to manipulate.) "

Writer: Sheer_plod

LCC:

Where:

Date: Dec 6 2014 2:21 PM