Abstract
The Calvin cycle is the primary pathway of carbon metabolism for biosynthesis of various components in photosynthetic organisms. In higher plants, the balance of contents between carbon and nitrogen are strictly regulated, indicating that many biosynthetic pathways may be regulated depending on photosynthetic carbon metabolism. We demonstrated that transgenic plants expressing cyanobacterial FBP/SBPase in chloroplasts exhibit increased photosynthetic CO2 fixation capacity and final dry matter under atmospheric conditions. Furthermore, we found that the branches and leaves of transgenic plants expressing FBP/SBPase in cytosol increase under high CO2 condition compared with the wild type. In these transgenic plants, the carbon partitioning in source and sink organs were different from those in the wild-type plants. In this review, we discuss the contribution of photosynthetic carbon metabolism to controlling the nitrogen metabolism and other various metabolic pathways using transgenic plants with altered photosynthetic capacity.
