Gene that Creates Plant Cell Walls Cloned

MEDIA CONTACT: Kenneth Keegstra or Robyn Perrin

MSU Dept. of Energy Plant Research Lab
(517) 353-7874 or 353-7876 or
Sue Nichols, University Relations
(517) 355-2281 [email protected]

RESEARCHERS CLONE GENE THAT CREATES PLANT CELL WALLS

EAST LANSING, Mich. - A plant's cell walls are the very foundation of the organism, yet until now scientists could only admire the structure without understanding how it was built.

Researchers at Michigan State University announce in the June 18 edition of Science magazine that they have cloned one of the genes that creates part of a plant's cell wall.

"An important frontier of cell biology is the cell wall," said Kenneth Keegstra, director of MSU Department of Energy Plant Research Lab and one of the authors of the article. "This is an important first step of many required to understand cell wall biosynthesis. It's fundamental knowledge that ultimately could be used to make a better plant."

The cell walls of plants are unique. Animals rely on skeletons for their rigidity, but the sturdiness of a wooden lawn chair and the graceful tilt of a daisy are courtesy of the complex makeup of a plant's cell wall.

The cell wall controls a plant's size and shape - sculpting the plant from the outside. It serves as a protective barrier between the plant and the outside world. It also controls how plant cells communicate with one another, Keegstra said.

Scientists could appreciate the plant cell wall. They understood its construction materials: cellulose, hemicellulose and pectins. But the mechanism that controlled its growth remained a mystery.

Keegstra and his research team, which included graduate student Robyn Perrin, the paper's primary author, and Natasha Raikhel, University Distinguished Professor in the MSU-DOE plant laboratory, had to start from scratch to unlock the genetic code of the enzyme xyloglucan fucosyltransferase, which is one of the enzymes that controls plant growth.

"The enzyme is sufficiently different from the other enzymes that do similar things in animals, so we couldn't rely on that existing information," Perrin said. "We had to sequence part of the protein from scratch, then go back and determine its genetic structure."

The team compared genetic data gathered in the Arabidopsis Genome Project to help unlock the enzyme's genetic code.

Michigan State is a leader in The Arabidopsis Functional Genomics Consortium (AFGC), a National Science Foundation-funded collaboration among several U.S. academic institutions working together to utilize and develop state-of-the-art technologies in Arabidopsis genomics.

Keegstra emphasized that this is basic research - not genetic engineering that produces a changed plant.

"Right now, we're not necessarily trying to make a better plant, we're trying to answer a fundamental question that will ultimately be used to make a better plant."

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