A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign research initiative on which Biosciences’ Krishna Niyogi has been a longtime collaborator received a $45 million, five-year reinvestment to continue efforts to re-engineer photosynthesis in staple crops order to sustainably increase yields worldwide. The new round of funding for Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, and the U.K. Department for International Development. Niyogi, a faculty scientist in Molecular Biophysics and Integrative Bioimaging (MBIB) and chair of the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley, has been involved with RIPE since its inception. His research related to the project focuses on relaxing the protective mechanisms plants have developed to avoid damage to leaves from high-intensity light. Read more from UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources.