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That allowed the researchers to home in on the most efficient recipe for producing glycolate.

Erb says he and his colleagues hope to modify their setup further to produce other organic compounds that are even more valuable than glycolate, such as drug molecules.

The enzymes convert the CO2 into a molecule called glycolate that can be used as a feedstock for making useful organic products.

Ort has developed tobacco plants with chloroplasts that lack glycolate transporters, and so are forced to metabolize the compound in that organelle using the more-efficient pathway.

Organisms, such as the bacterium Escherichia coli, have more-efficient reaction pathways for metabolizing glycolate than the complex pathways that evolved in plants.