New Delhi: Banaras Hindu University (BHU) Researchers from Department of Botany have discovered that a high concentration of heavy metal called “Cadmium” significantly impacts the photosynthetic process of plants and further affects its production.
As per BHU, the research team asserts that in long term, this may result in worries about food security, which have already grown due to current climate conditions. In simpler words, the enhanced stress of Cadmium will adversely impact the productivity of plants/crops.
Yogesh Mishra, an Assistant Professor at BHU Faculty of Botany, and PhD candidates, Akanksha Srivastava and Subhankar Biswas present their research regarding the same in their journal BBA-Proteins and Proteomics (January 2023).
Researchers made the groundbreaking discovery that "LexA protein" controls critical photosynthetic genes to control photosynthetic processes. These results are anticipated to be helpful in future studies to investigate problems related to toxicity of heavy metals in environment.
According to the BHU official statement released, these discoveries might also be applied to the development of stress-resistant crops with higher photosynthetic efficiency, thus assisting in the solution of the problem of food security.
Yogesh Mishra shared, "Since photosynthesis is one of the vital processes that is affected by heavy metal stress, our findings are promising for the development of recombinant cyanobacteria with improved photosynthetic efficiency and heavy metal tolerance capacity”.
Earlier, BHU and Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) collaborated on research projects and published journals “Experimental Botany” in 2022 and “Algal Research” in 2021. The research project was supported and funded by the Government of India.
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