Tag: Metabolism

Chlorophyll has an aliphatic phytol side chain that anchors it to light-harvesting complexes. During senescence, chlorophyll is degraded first by the enzymatic removal of Mg to produce pheophytin, which is dephytlated by pheophytinase. Through the identification of a mutant allele with elevated enzymatic…

IN BRIEF by Jennifer Mach [email protected] Green may have been the Pantone Color of the Year for 2013 (http://www.pantone.com/color-of-the-year-2013), but 2016 was a great year for papers on chlorophyll research, at The Plant Cell and beyond. In this year, we saw a pile of interesting papers examining…

We’ve highlighted some of the Plant Cell papers that were widely shared, liked, blogged, retweeted and otherwise garnered high-levels of attention this year. Perhaps you can use some holiday-season quiet time to catch up on those you missed. Reviews and Perspectives Creating order from chaos: epigenome…

We’ve highlighted some of the Plant Physiology papers that were widely shared, liked, blogged, retweeted and otherwise garnered high-levels of attention this year. Perhaps you can use some of that holiday-season quiet time to catch up on those you missed. The breakaway attention-getter from Plant…

Biofortification is the nutritional enhancement (using conventional or genetic engineering approaches) of food with vitamins or micronutrients with the goal of improving the human diet. A set of new reviews in Current Opinion in Biotechnology summarizes progress towards biofortification of plants to…

A metabolon is a physical clustering of metabolic pathway proteins. Until now, evidence for metabolons has been patchy, but Laursen et al. convincingly demonstrate the physical association of several enzymes involved in the production of dhurrin, a defense compound of sorghum. They use a method involving…

Nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria such as Anabaena sp. PCC 7120 have the challenge of supporting nitrogenase, an enzyme that is highly sensitive to oxygen, and simultaneously photosynthesis, an oxygen-producing set of reactions. They accomplish this by segregating these reactions into two cells, heterocysts…

IN BRIEF by Kathleen L. Farquharson [email protected] Alternative splicing (AS) regulates gene expression and greatly expands the coding capacity of complex genomes. By regulating which elements of an mRNA transcript are removed or retained, AS produces multiple transcripts from a single gene. Some…