Abstract Photosynthesis by which plants convert carbon dioxide to sugars using the energy of light is fundamental to life as it forms the basis of nearly all food chains. Surprisingly, our knowledge about its transcriptional regulation remains incomplete. Effort for its agricultural optimization have mostly focused on post-translational regulatory processes 1–3 but photosynthesis is regulated at the post-transcriptional 4 and the transcriptional level 5 . Stacked transcription factor mutations remain photosynthetically active 5,6 and additional transcription factors have been difficult to identify possibly due to redundancy 6 or lethality. Using a random forest decision tree-based machine learning approach for gene regulatory network calculation 7 we determined ranked candidate transcription factors and validated five out of five tested transcription factors as controlling photosynthesis in vivo . The detailed analyses of previously published and newly identified transcription factors suggest that photosynthesis is transcriptionally regulated in a partitioned, non-hierarchical, interlooped network.

Transcription factors mediating regulation of photosynthesis