For decades, biologists have believed a key enzyme in plants had one function—produce amino acids, which are vital to plant survival and also essential to human diets.
For decades, biologists have believed a key enzyme in plants had one function—produce amino acids, which are vital to plant survival and also essential to human diets.
But for Wellington Muchero, Meng Xie and their colleagues, this enzyme does more than advertised. They had run a series of experiments on poplar plants that consistently revealed mutations in a structure of the life-sustaining enzyme that was not previously known to exist.
Their discovery could alter the course of gene functional studies in plants and, if applied, it could squeeze more potential out of poplar as a renewable resource for making biofuels and bioproducts.
“At first, we thought it was a mistake, because the enzyme does not need to bind DNA to perform its known function,” said Muchero, a biologist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “We repeated the experiment multiple times and kept seeing evidence in the data that the same gene involved in making amino acids also regulates the function of genes involved in producing lignin.”
Read more at DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Image: Meng Xie (left) and Wellington Muchero of Oak Ridge National Laboratory led a team that discovered a critical gene in poplar plants that consistently revealed mutations that was not previously known to exist. (Credit: Genevieve Martin/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy)
