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In light of a growing global population and global climate change with its extreme weather events, agriculture needs more efficient and robust crops. However, at present, it can take months or even years to equip crops with new traits due to a lack of standardized, high-throughput methods.

This gap is now being closed by the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology and the Center for Synthetic Microbiology (SYNMIKRO) - formerly LOEWE-SYNMIKRO: together they have developed a test platform using the microalga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, which for the first time opens up plant chloroplasts for high-throughput applications and thus enables the systematic and rapid testing of genetic changes in chloroplasts on a large scale.

An impressive example: The team incorporated a synthetic metabolic pathway into the algae's chloroplasts, enabling the algae to absorb more CO₂ under stress conditions and produce almost twice as much biomass. This demonstrates how targeted interventions in chloroplast metabolic pathways can increase their productivity.

"The platform presented here will play a central role in both the research association ‘Robust Chloroplasts’ and the Cluster of Excellence ‘Microbes-4-Climate’, in which we, together with the University of Marburg, aim to develop new biologically based approaches to combat climate change," says Tobias Erb. "Such key technologies are essential for conducting targeted research at a pace that reflects the urgency of the task in the face of climate change."