Dr. Britta Förster
Research Focus
Cyanobacteria are amazingly efficient in photosynthetic carbon capture due to their biophysical CO2 Concentrating mechanism (CCM) which consist of active inorganic carbon uptake proteins and condensation of the primary CO2 fixing enzyme, Rubisco, in proteinaceous micro-compartments called carboxysomes. Modelling suggest an up to 60% boost in yield for expression of a full CCM in higher plant chloroplasts, and up to 16% yield improvement with the introduction of Ci uptake by bicarbonate transporters on the chloroplast envelope. As a first step, we have used directed evolution in E. coli to generate variants of the bicarbonate transporter BicA that function outside cyanobacteria in the heterologous bacterial system. Our current research is focused on the phenotypic characterization of transgenic Tobacco plants expressing BicA variants in the chloroplast envelope. To assess functionality of BicA and estimate its impact on photosynthesis and plant growth we apply a wide range of noninvasive plant phenotyping approaches alongside analyses of metabolite fluxes.
