It isn’t easy being green.
It isn’t easy being green. It takes thousands of genes to build the photosynthetic machinery that plants need to harness sunlight for growth. And yet, researchers don’t know exactly how these genes work.
Now a team led by Princeton University researchers has constructed a public “library” to help researchers to find out what each gene does. Using the library, the team identified 303 genes associated with photosynthesis including 21 newly discovered genes with high potential to provide new insights into this life-sustaining biological process. The study was published this week in Nature Genetics.
“The part of the plant responsible for photosynthesis is like a complex machine made up of many parts, and we want to understand what each part does,” said Martin Jonikas, assistant professor of molecular biology at Princeton. “This library, we hope, will be one of the foundations that people will build on to make the next generation of discoveries.”
Read more at Princeton University
Photo: To build the library, researchers grew tens of thousands of strains of algae in plastic plates. The project, which took nine years, allows researchers to explore genes involved in photosynthesis and other aspects of plant biology. Photo courtesy of the researchers
