Researchers develop biotechnological process for jasmonic acid production

Monday, June 1, 2020 - 07:00 in Biology & Nature

Plants produce the hormone jasmonic acid as a defence response when challenged, making their leaves taste bad to predators. Biologists want to determine whether biological precursors and other variants of jasmonic acid lead to similar or different effects. But such derivatives of the hormone have so far been too expensive for experiments and difficult to come by. Researchers from the Faculties of Chemistry and Biology at Bielefeld University have now developed a method to make the production of a biologically significant precursor of jasmonic acid more efficient and cheaper. Their innovation: They imitated how plants produce the hormone. The result is 12-OPDA, a central precursor of jasmonic acid. In the long term, it could also be a potential precursor for high-quality perfume. The researchers published their method on May 29 in the research journal Advanced Science.

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