New evidence for grain specific C4 photosynthesis in wheat | Hacker News Reader

New evidence for grain specific C4 photosynthesis in wheat

nature.com

37 pointsokket12 comments

I don't understand why this is in Nature Scientific Reports - a relatively new, small journal that has published some bad things in the past. If this is true and well-supported it would belong into the 'main' Nature or Science journal!

Does Australia have an open access requirement? Some people at institutions requiring open access preferentially submit to journals where that is the default. That said, they could have submitted to eLife if that was the case.

When you submit to Nature and they reject the paper, they suggest you try again at Scientific Reports. Resubmitting there saves you some steps if you had reviews for your Nature submission.

Actually, they first bump you down to Nature Communications, which is still relatively prestigious. If it's rejected also there, you get bumped down to Scientific Reports (where they've dropped "Nature" from the name). It's not very prestigious and, like e.g. PLOS One, does not require a paper to be particularly novel or groundbreaking. Unless your paper is truly bad, it will get accepted at Scientific Reports if you can afford the publishing fee. Since there have been several reports of essentially nonexistent peer review from the journal, many people are a bit skeptical.

Since it's not very prestigious and kind of a last resort for authors, people also tend to be a bit skeptical when papers published there are featured in the mainstream press.

However, all scientists will readily acknowledge that the peer review process can often be flawed, so "a bit skeptical" should not be taken as "outright dismissal".

> Since there have been several reports of essentially nonexistent peer review from the journal, many people are a bit skeptical.

Speaking from personal experience (from our own group and also from a colleague), their peer review is no better or worse than any of the other big-name publishers.

And, in regards to the OP's comments, I wouldn't consider where a paper is published to be a particularly good indicator of its quality, provided it's at least a well-known/well-established journal (e.g. in the top-20 on Google's rankings for a given field[1]).

I've been accepted and rejected by both prestigious and lesser-well-known journals, and experienced peer review by both, and it's always been very variable in quality. There also seems to be very little correlation between how interesting/ground-breaking/mundane/boring the research is and which journal it gets accepted into, and this mirrors the experience of a lot of my colleagues.

The simple fact is that the big journals just get far too many submissions and the research is usually too specialised to guarantee consistently-good peer review, or even consistently good selection of what papers should even be accepted.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=e...

Care to give a simple eummary for us total newbs?

C3 and C4 refer to different methods of photosynthesis. C4 confers advantages in sub optimal conditions - the most obvious form is growing in conditions of water stress.

Study authors show through a whole pile of methods that the grain part of wheat uses C4 like photosynthesis while the rest of the plant uses C3 (we previously had always just classified wheat as C3).

This is an additional piece of evidence that falls inline with a large spectrum of previous evidence pointing to relatively complex distribution of the spectrum of C3 to C4 traits. Other cases include finding C3 mechanisms in use in the leafs of the ears of corn (a C4 plant).

Authors end with the suggestion that since the C4-like genes are already present, it would then be easier to breed and/or engineer wheat varieties to using higher proportion of C4-like photosynthesis.

While the abstract calls out breeding specifically, the discussion calls out genetic manipulation. You can interpret that choice as you will.

> C3 and C4 refer to different methods of photosynthesis. C4 confers advantages in sub optimal conditions - the most obvious form is growing in conditions of water stress.

It's been a while so I don't have a reference of the top of my head but [0] this is not correct. C4 plants will have better yield in any conditions where C3 plants reach light saturation - which applies to a lot of agricultural regions of central latitude.

[0] edit: Photosynthesis vs Irradiance graph from google images illustrating this: http://aciar.gov.au/files/mn-158/img/Figure_02.2.png

That's interesting: "C3 angiosperms evolved more than 50 times independently into C4 plants (Muhaidat et al., 2007" http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/155/1/56

Fascinating that they take the 'bred in' approach as opposed to suggesting GM, as an article would have done 15-20 years ago - the scaremongers have won

If "genetically modified" doesn't apply to this then it appears meaningless as a useful term to me.

So what I take from this is that C4 photosynthesis could be arrived at through marker assisted selection, i.e. traditional breeding, rather than through GMO.

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