Re-engineering a plant's bio-clock: new research

In California, U.C. San Diego researchers have discovered a protein complex that regulates plant growth, which they call the “evening complex”, as it regulates they rhythmic growth of plants during the night.

The biologists can now show how this protein complex is intricately coordinated through the biological clock with the genes that promote stem elongation in a way that could enable plant breeders to engineer new varieties of crops that grow faster, produce greater yields of food or generate more biomass per acre of land for conversion into biofuels.