[mikeyouse]

If you had a widely applicable improvement, you’d be able to grow fruit trees in Canada or have two harvests in one season for food crops, or grow much denser species of wood, much more quickly for construction lumber. It would be massively world changing — but it is a 4 billion year old enzyme so is pretty entrenched..

[rendaw]

Oh interesting! Is photosynthesis the main thing limiting growth speed?

I would have expected there to be multiple processes with similar or aligned timings, or some built in limiting mechanism or something... it's not like giving humans higher calorie food makes them become adults faster.

[mikeyouse]

Improving rubsico would be more along the lines of improving your metabolism so that you can process 4,000 calories per day with the loose analog of supplying more CO2 being the ‘higher calorie food’. It’s the single largest bottleneck in photosynthetic efficiency. TBH, it would likely take several more breakthroughs for plants to make use of an improved rubisco but it’s still a massive target for ag research.