An improved method for genetic engineering of plants for biofuel

Researchers have developed a system that will allow scientists to identify and characterize the role of substances that transport sugars inside cells, substances that are essential components in the biosynthesis of cell walls in plants

Researchers have developed a new and powerful scientific tool that will be able to assist in the genetic engineering of crops used to make fuels in the framework of clean, "green" and renewable bioenergy - a system that will allow scientists to identify and characterize the role of substances that transport sugars inside cells, substances that are essential components in the biosynthesis of cell walls in plants .

The scientists, from the US Department of Energy (DOE) and Berkeley Lab, explain: "Our unique system allowed us to characterize the activity of substances responsible for the transfer of sugars in the plant 'Arabidopsis' and locate a family of six substances New ones that have never been described in the literature," says Henrik Scheller, one of the main researchers. "Our method could offer rapid progress in the field of determining the functions of substances that transport sugars in plants and other organisms, an important issue for the metabolic engineering of cell walls." The article describing the results of the study has long been published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The sugars found in the biomass of plants are a source of great potential for the development of environmentally friendly energy if they can be effectively converted into transportation fuels - gasoline, diesel and jet fuel - in a way that will be economically competitive with gasoline-based fuels. One of the success factors in this effort will be to engineer plant crops whose cell walls have been optimized in terms of their sugar content.

Except for cellulose (cellulose) and callose, the complex polysaccharides found in plant cell walls are synthesized in the Golgi organelle by enzymes called glycosyltransferases. These polysaccharides are built from raw materials of simpler sugars that are transferred into the Golgi organelle from the cytosol, or cytoplasmic matrix, which is the cytoplasmic fluid found inside the cells, and which is not part of the cell organelles and is not bounded by internal membranes within the cell. Despite their great importance, only a small number of substances responsible for the transfer of these sugars have been characterized at the molecular level. A significant part of the delay in this research was the lack of materials required to perform these characterizations.

"Substances that transport sugars of mammalian origin are commercially available due to the medical interest in them, but those of plant origin are not so available, which makes their research and the enzymes related to them challenging," explains the lead researcher.

To develop their new system, the researchers prepared several artificial substances capable of transporting sugars into cells and then inserted them into liposomes for examination by mass spectroscopy. The researchers used this method to characterize the activity of 6 new substances responsible for the transfer of sugars in the Arabidopsis plant, a relative of the mustard plant, which is used as a model plant in advanced biofuel research.

"We found that the availability of the limiting raw material has different effects regarding the separate polysaccharide products, which suggests that the biosynthesis of the polysaccharides in the cell walls in the Golgi organelle of plants is also regulated by mechanisms responsible for the transfer of the raw materials." In addition to the detection of these 6 new substances, the new method was used to characterize 20 additional sugar-transferring substances whose details will be published soon.

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