PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Photosynthesis by which plants convert carbon dioxide to sugars using the energy of light is fundamental to life as it forms the basis of nearly all food chains. Surprisingly, our knowledge about its transcriptional regulation remains incomplete. Effort for its agricultural optimization have mostly focused on post-translational regulatory processes^1–3but photosynthesis is regulated at the post-transcriptional⁴and the transcriptional level⁵. Stacked transcription factor mutations remain photosynthetically active^5,6and additional transcription factors have been difficult to identify possibly due to redundancy⁶or lethality. Using a random forest decision tree-based machine learning approach for gene regulatory network calculation⁷we determined ranked candidate transcription factors and validated five out of five tested transcription factors as controlling photosynthesisin vivo. The detailed analyses of previously published and newly identified transcription factors suggest that photosynthesis is transcriptionally regulated in a partitioned, non-hierarchical, interlooped network.