Researchers uncover potential climate change-nutrition connection in plant metabolism

New research by researchers at Michigan State University shows there’s still much to learn about how plants function and how nutritious they are as more carbon enters our atmosphere. I am emphasizing that

The same carbon influx is helping drive climate change.So this new study is published in the journal natural plantmay reveal unexpected ways in which this global phenomenon is reshaping nature and our lives.

“What we’re seeing is a link between climate change and nutrition,” said Berkeley Walker, an assistant professor in the Department of Plant Biology whose research team authored the new report. This is something we didn’t know we were looking at when we started our investigation.”

Increased carbon dioxide levels could be good for photosynthesis, but Walker and his lab also showed increased carbon dioxide₂ Levels can mess with other metabolic processes in plants. And these lesser-known processes can affect other functions, such as protein production.

“Plants like CO₂Give it more and they’ll make more food and grow bigger.Large plants with less protein content? It actually has less nutritional value. “

It’s too early to say whether plants face a low-protein future, Walker said. It raises a surprising question about

And the harder we work now to address these issues, the more prepared we will be to face the future, said Xinyu Fu, lead author and postdoctoral researcher in the report.

“The more we know about how plants use different metabolic pathways in changing environments, the easier it will be to find ways to manipulate metabolic flux, ultimately making plants more efficient and nutritious.” We can make it into something,” said Fu.

If the plant doesn’t do well at first, it has photorespiration

The basics of photosynthesis are straightforward. Plants take in water and carbon dioxide from their surroundings and convert them into sugar and oxygen with the help of sunlight.

But this process can start on the wrong foot. The enzyme responsible for collecting carbon dioxide can grab onto the oxygen molecule instead.

This creates a by-product that, if left unchecked, essentially suffocates the plant, says Walker. But thankfully, plants have evolved a process called photorespiration. This removes harmful by-products and allows enzymes to resume photosynthesis.

Photorespiration is not as famous as photosynthesis and sometimes gets a bad reputation because it consumes carbon and energy that can be used to make food.

“It’s like recycling,” Walker said. “I wish I didn’t have to, but as long as it’s producing waste, it’s better to use it.”

To do its job, photorespiration incorporates carbon into other molecules or metabolites. Some of them are amino acids, the precursors of proteins.

“So photorespiration may be upcycling, not just recycling,” says Walker.

There’s a reason Walker used “may” instead of “is” in his statement. Photorespiration still has some mysteries, and the fate of its metabolites is one of them .

metabolic studies

As for where the amino acids produced by photorespiration end up, one established theory was that they remain in a closed loop. That is, the metabolites produced in the process are restricted to selected groups of organelles and biochemical processes.

MSU researchers now show that this is not always the case. In particular, they showed that the amino acids glycine and serine can escape the boundary of its closed loop.

What happens to the compound in the end is a lingering question, and one that may become increasingly important as carbon dioxide levels rise.

With more carbon dioxide available, plants’ photorespiration decreases, so scientists need to look more deeply into how plants produce and use these amino acids, Walker said. said.

But for the time being, he and his team are thrilled to have reached this discovery. That included supplying plants with a special kind of carbon dioxide, which he said had one more neutron than carbon atoms normally found in the atmosphere.

Since neutrons are elementary particles, they have a very small mass. He cuts the paperclip into a trillion pieces, and cuts one of them into another trillion pieces, and the smallest piece has about the same mass as a neutron.

But the MSU collaboration had the tools and expertise needed to measure small differences in mass. Combining these measurements with computational modeling allows researchers to track the slightly stronger carbon and see how plants integrate it at different metabolic stages when conditions favor photorespiration. I was.

“This new technique allows us to more quantitatively understand important metabolic pathways in plants,” said Fu. “With the novel flux approach, we have begun to uncover the dynamic state of metabolic pathways and understand metabolism as a whole system.”

Walker, who joined MSU in 2018, said: also includes graduate student Luke Gregory and research assistant Sean Wise.

But other colleagues at MSU also helped. For example, at the university he is Professor Thomas Sharkey, Professor Yair Shachar-Hill, Mass Spectrometry and Metabolomics his core team, and others.

“Joining MSU has made this possible,” says Walker.