Humans have an enzyme called FTO that demethylates N6-methyladenosine through oxidation. It’s part of a large family of enzymes that do this sort of thing using an iron atom in their active sites, along with molecular oxygen. Plants, though, don’t have an FTO homolog – they have some other enzymes that can demethylate this substrate, but not like FTO itself. So the team behind this paper wanted to see what would happen if you engineered the FTO enzyme into plants. In rice and potatoes, the crop yields went up by 50%. Grain size in the rice plants didn’t change, nor did the height of the plants – they just produced a lot more rice grains in general. How does this happen? The plants’ root systems were deeper and more extensive, and photosynthetic efficiency went up by a startling 36%. Transpiration from the leaves was up 78%, but at the same time, the plants of both species showed significantly higher drought tolerance. These are highly desirable traits, and it’s worth noting that a lot of this extra biomass is coming from increased usage of carbon dioxide from the air.

Now we just need to crush the GMO luddites to roll this out.

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