Boon to plant science:
Monday, August 30, 2010 - 13:28
in Biology & Nature
In both plant and animal cells, protein activity is often regulated by phosphorylation, by which a phosphate group is added to one or more sites on a protein. A team led by Ken Shirasu of RIKEN Plant Science Center, Yokohama, Japan, has found very similar patterns of protein phosphorylation even in distantly related plant species, a discovery that should advance plant engineering. The data is now freely available online from RIKEN's new Plant Phosphoproteome Database.