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Plants in the News
1
Plants Eat Their Own Membranes...
Neha Patel
30/04/2019
Discovery
- Biochemists at the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory
-Two ways that autophagy, or self-eating control the levels of oils in plant cells
Topic 1
The Plant Cell
Published on April 29, 2019
-Describes how this cannibalistic-sounding process actually helps plants survive
-Way to accumulate more oil in vegetative tissues--leaves, stems, and roots
-Make plants more useful as energy crops
-Abundant plant oil could be extracted and used as fuel to run cars, generate electricity, heat buildings, etc
Study shows..
Autophagy plays two major roles:
(1) important for biosynthesis of lipid droplets
(2) role in breaking down these droplets to produce energy
Cellular-Scale Recycling
-odd strategy for survival (universal)
-Brookhaven team used plants already modified to store oil in lipid droplets in their leaves
-Track where the oil came from?
Results: not directly incorporated into lipid droplets; became part of the cells' various membranes
Eating the old membranes was important for the build-up of the stored oil.
-70% reduction with the turning off of autophagy genes