Abstract: It is of great significance to improve the crop planting benefit by improving the technical level of crop production. Photosynthesis is the basis of plant growth and development. It will play an important role in improving the production level of plants, by cultivating the plant varieties with efficient utilization of light energy. The high photosynthetic efficiency plants are the plants with high light efficiency. In the process of photosynthesis, green plants firstly capture solar energy through the light-harvesting antenna system on the leaves, and convert it into electrical energy at the complex center of the photosystems. Then, the electrons are further transferred to each protein complex and electron transporter of the photosynthetic membrane, and the energy is stored in ATP and NAD(P)H. Finally, the light energy is converted into chemical energy and stored as organic matter in plants. Focusing on how to improve the utilization efficiency of light energy in plants, we reviewed three important researches in this paper, including increasing the absorption of light energy, accelerating the transfer of electrons and energy transformation during photosynthesis, reducing the loss of light energy and improving the efficiency of carbon assimilation. Meanwhile, this paper pointed out the main shortcomings of the current research, including the single research of plants under the specific conditions, the lack of research on photosynthetic performance of plant population and the lack of research on the source-sink. On this basis, combining the recent research of the genome-wide association analysis, the emerging synthetic biotechnology and the phyllosphere microorganism, the future development was prospected, which will offer guidance to the research of the high photosynthetic efficiency in plants, and provide an important theoretical support for improving the crop yield in China.

Key words: plant, photosynthesis, high photosynthetic efficiency, light energy utilization efficiency