How plants regulate sugar deposition in cell walls
Thursday, January 10, 2019 - 12:00
in Biology & Nature
Ultimately, researchers want to engineer bioenergy crops to accumulate large amounts of easy-to-use sugars. Researchers from the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center identified a major part of the sugar production process in a model leafy grass. They discovered a transcription factor, which turns a gene on and off. The gene triggers the synthesis of a sugar, called mixed-linkage glucan (MLG). Characterizing downstream genes regulated by this transcription factor provides insight into how plants make MLG. This information is vital to overcoming growth defects associated with engineering plants to produce large quantities of MLG.