Growth, weight and starch content
The up-regulation of any functionally indispensable gene product(s) usually results in alterations in the development of the plant. We compared the overall growth of VC, CAx3 and CAx5 plants, all for 3-week old plants. The CAx3 and CAx5 plants had longer (~14%) roots than that of VC (Table 3). However, their shoot lengths were almost similar (Table 3) . The CAx3 and CAx5 plants had bigger (11%-15%) rosette diameter than the VC plants (Table 3) . After 3 weeks of growth, the dry weight of CAx3 and CAx5 plants increased by 14%, and 20%, respectively than that in VC (Fig. 7b) . Furthermore, increased photosynthetic carbon assimilation in the transgenics resulted in higher starch content (10-19%), estimated before the end of the day (Fig. 7c) .