Journal of Energy Bioscience 2025, Vol.16, No.4, 205-215 http://bioscipublisher.com/index.php/jeb 205 Prospects Open Access Engineering C4 Photosynthetic Pathway into Wheat: Progress and Prospects Zhongying Liu, Wei Wang Institute of Life Science, Jiyang College of Zhejiang A&F University, Zhuji, 311800, China Corresponding email: anita.wei.wang@jicat.org Journal of Energy Bioscience, 2025, Vol.16, No.4 doi: 10.5376/jeb.2025.16.0020 Received: 29 Jun., 2025 Accepted: 08 Aug., 2025 Published: 19 Aug., 2025 Copyright © 2025 Liu and Wang, This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Preferred citation for this article: Liu Z.Y., and Wang W., 2025, Engineering C4 photosynthetic pathway into wheat: progress and prospects, Journal of Energy Bioscience, 16(4): 205-215(doi: 10.5376/jeb.2025.16.0020) Abstract Under conditions of high temperature and drought, C3 crops such as wheat experience increased photorespiration, reduced photosynthetic efficiency, and limited yield. The C4 photosynthetic pathway has a high efficiency in carbon dioxide concentration and good utilization rates of water and nutrients, and is regarded as an important direction for increasing the yield of C3 crops. Recent studies have found that there are C4-related genes in wheat and they are expressed in tissues such as grains. In plants such as rice, the exogenous expression of some C4 enzymes has been achieved. However, there are still challenges in constructing the C4 pathway in wheat, such as cell-specific expression, Kranz structure reconstruction, and complex gene regulatory networks. By integrating methods such as systems biology and gene editing, this study aims to promote the realization of the C4 mechanism in wheat, providing solutions for food security and climate change. Keywords C4 Photosynthetic pathway; Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.); Genetic engineering; Photosynthetic efficiency; Systems biology 1 Introduction Global food security is now facing significant challenges. The world's population is constantly increasing, arable land is decreasing, and climate change is becoming more and more serious. To ensure food supply, it is necessary to increase crop yields and the efficiency of resource utilization. This has become an important task in agricultural science. The breeding methods of the past "Green Revolution" have nearly reached the limit of yield increase on major food crops and are difficult to meet the future demand for food, fiber and fuel (Dehigaspitiya et al., 2019; Pradhan et al., 2022; Nadipalli et al., 2024). Therefore, cultivating new crops that are high-yielding, efficient and stress-resistant is the key to the sustainable development of global agriculture. Wheat is one of the most important C3 crops in the world. However, its photosynthetic efficiency is limited by the C3 pathway itself. In high-temperature, low-CO2 and arid environments, photorespiration will increase, carbon fixation efficiency will decline, and the utilization rates of water and nitrogen will also decrease. All these limit the yield potential of wheat (Perdomo et al., 2017; Juric et al., 2019; Prasanna et al., 2025). In addition, C3 crops have poor adaptability to environmental stress, which makes food security risks greater (Perdomo et al., 2017; Sonmez et al., 2022). C4 photosynthesis has its unique biochemical advantages and leaf structure advantages. Under conditions such as high temperature, strong light and drought, the photosynthetic efficiency and resource utilization rate of C4 photosynthesis are higher. C4 plants reduce photorespiration and increase carbon assimilation rate through CO2 concentration mechanism (Wang et al., 2014; Schuler et al., 2016; Prasanna et al., 2025). Introducing the C4 photosynthesis mechanism into C3 crops such as wheat holds promise for breaking through yield limitations and addressing food security issues (Cui, 2021; Pradhan et al., 2022; Mukundan et al., 2024; Prasanna et al., 2025). Current studies have shown that introducing C4-related genes into C3 crops can enhance their photosynthetic efficiency, stress resistance and yield, etc. (Furbank et al., 2023; Nadipalli et al., 2024; Prasanna et al., 2025).
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