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To find out, Xiao-Hong Yu and Yuanheng Cai designed a strategy to crossbreed the defective off-switch plants with an Arabidopsis strain engineered to produce hydroxy fatty acids-one of the specialty types scientists would like to produce for industrial applications. They wondered what would happen if the BADC genes were disabled in plants engineered to produce specialty fatty acids. In these plants, the off switch is disabled and the plants crank out high levels of endogenous fatty acids. Through earlier studies, Shanklin’s group had created a strain of Arabidopsis (a model plant) that has two of its BADC genes deleted. This idea provided a way for the teams to combine efforts on a new experiment. “Imagine working in the same lab on different projects and in a lab meeting one day, you look at each other and ask, ‘Is it possible we’re working on the same thing?’” Shanklin said. “Because of this, they appeared to be two separate processes,” Shanklin said.īut as the two teams discussed their projects, they began to wonder if the specialty fatty acids were triggering the same off switch triggered by high levels of ordinary fatty acids. In contrast, the shutdown mechanism triggered by the specialty fatty acids (ones being produced by genes artificially added to the plant) kicks in when even small amounts of the “foreign” fatty acids are present, and endogenous fatty acids aren’t in excess. That toothless gear (known as BADC) slows the fatty acid-producing machinery until endogenous fatty acid levels fall. “It’s like a gear with no teeth,” Shanklin said. One of the ACCase subunits gets replaced by a version that isn’t functional. But feeding plants additional endogenous fatty acids triggers a substitution in the machinery. As long as endogenous fatty acids are below a certain level, the four “gears” mesh and the machine cranks out fatty acids for oil production. It has four parts, or subunits-you can think of them as gears. In the case of plant oils, the key machinery that controls production is an enzyme called ACCase. Plants bred to lack genes for making BADC could potentially produce large amounts of economically important fatty acids. High levels of ordinary fatty acids, or even small amounts of specialty hydroxy fatty acids, trigger a substitution in the machinery: BADC, which acts like a gear with no teeth, takes the place of BCCP, slowing production down. We have now nailed down the mechanism and opened up the possibility of achieving that dream.”Ī plant enzyme called ACCase acts like a four-gear "machine" to crank out fatty acids, the building blocks of oil. A number of research groups have been trying to figure out why this happens. “But we’ve been stymied from using them because we didn’t know why they dramatically slow fatty acid and oil synthesis. “Since scientists discovered the genes responsible for making specialty fatty acids several decades ago, we’ve dreamed of putting them into crop plants to make abundant renewable sources of desired fatty acids,” said John Shanklin, chair of Brookhaven Lab’s biology department, who oversaw the project.
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The work paves the way for making at least one industrially important specialty fatty acid in plants-and may work for many others. As described in the journal Plant Physiology, they crossbred model plants and conducted detailed biochemical-genetic analyses to demonstrate a strategy for reversing the roadblock and ramping up production. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have converged to discover the mechanism behind the oil-production slowdown. Now two teams of biochemists working on separate aspects of oil synthesis at the U.S. But attempts to put genes for making these specialty building blocks into crops have had the opposite effect: Seeds from plants with genes added to make specialty fatty acids accumulated dramatically less oil. UPTON, NY – Hundreds of naturally occurring specialty fatty acids (building blocks of oils) have potential for use as raw materials for making lubricants, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and more- if they could be produced at large scale by crop plants. Biochemist Xiao-Hong Yu's research on specialty fatty acid production in plants got a boost from collaborating with colleagues studying an off-switch that regulates ordinary fatty acid synthesis.