In Japan, two enzymes that plants need to make oils live in different organelles, a pair of RIKEN researchers has found. This finding will help inform efforts to tweak the metabolism of plants to boost their production of oils, which can be used as biofuels among other things.
Oils are formed in the endoplasmic reticulum—a large structure in plant cells that performs multiple functions. A key step in lipid synthesis is catalyzed by an enzyme known as phosphatidic acid phosphatase. It has a dozen or so different forms that have slightly different sequences of amino acids, but it wasn’t known which of these forms are essential for lipid synthesis.
Now researchers have shown that two forms of phosphatidic acid phosphatase, LPPα2 and LPPα1, are required to make lipids in thale cress. The research is published in The Plant Cell.
When the researchers knocked out the genes that code for LPPα2 and LPPα1, the resulting plants didn’t survive.
In a surprising twist, the researchers found that the forms don’t reside in the same organelles: LPPα2 is in the endoplasmic reticulum, whereas LPPα1 is found nearby in chloroplasts—the site where photosynthesis occurs.
