ibc.wsu.eduInstitute of Biological Chemistry | Washington State University

Skip to main content Skip to navigation C ollege of A gricultural, H uman, and N atural R esource S ciences Apply Request Info Give Institute of Biological Chemistry Washington State University Institute of Biological Chemistry The Institute of Biological Chemistry (IBC) was established at Washington State University in 1980 to pursue fundamental research in the molecular biology and biochemistry of plants. Work at the IBC focuses on basic plant science with an emphasis on plant derived products synthesis, determinants of plant architecture, bioenergetics, and plant-microbe interacts. The research outcomes have potential applications in agricultural biotechnology, bioenergy, and medicine. For more information about specific research programs in the IBC, please call us at (509) 335-8382, fax to (509) 335-7643 or email us at instbiolchem@wsu.edu . IBC News and Updates Dr. Phil Bates’ lab in collaboration with CSIRO Agriculture & Food in Australia and USDA Donald Danforth Plant Science Center published a paper in Plant Physiology . A recent trend in the plant oil field is to engineer plants to accumulate oils in vegetative tissues rather than just seed tissues. Vegetative oil crops have the potential to produce vastly more oil per unit of land than common temperate oilseed crops. However, oil biosynthesis is part of a complicated metabolic network involving essential membrane lipid biosynthesis. It is unclear how enhancing oil biosynthesis in a leaf tissue effects the control of fatty acid flux into various membrane systems. Therefore, to understand the metabolic plasticity of leaf lipid metabolism to adapt to new metabolic sinks induced by engineering, we analyzed the lipid metabolic flux in both wild-type and oil accumulating tobacco leaves using in vivo isotopic labeling. The results reveal unexpected changes within the lipid metabolic network that allow both membrane lipids and oil to accumulate, as well has provide insights into future leaf oil engineering. Dr. Helmut Kirchhoff’s lab in collaboration with the University of California recently published a journal article in the The Journal of Biological Chemistry on biological membranes containing high concentrations of so-called non-bilayer lipids, i.e. lipids that do not self-assemble into flat bilayer sheets if isolated. The role of these lipids in biomembranes in general in photosynthetic thylakoid membranes in particular is unknown. In their JBC publication, they established a proteoliposome platform that allows to study the role of non-bilayer lipids on isolated thylakoid protein complexes. They could show that the non-bilayer lipid monogalactosyldiacylglycerol effects the structure and function of the main light-harvesting complex II. It is hypothesized that non-bilayer lipids increase the hydrostatic pressure in lipid membranes that controls protein conformation, a mechanisms that hasn’t been discovered for photosynthetic membranes yet. Nitrogen-fixing genes could help grow more food using fewer resources Scientists have transferred a collection of genes into plant-colonizing bacteria that let them draw nitrogen from the air and turn it into ammonia, a natural fertilizer. The work could help farmers around the world use less man-made fertilizers to grow important food crops like wheat, corn, and soybeans. The group of scientists, including two from Washington State University, published the study “Control of nitrogen fixation in bacteria that associate with cereals” late last month in Nature Microbiology . “There’s a growing interest in reducing the amount of fertilizer used in agriculture because it’s expensive, has negative environmental impacts, and takes a lot of energy to make,” said John Peters, Director of WSU’s Institute of Biological Chemistry and a co-author on the paper. “There’s a huge benefit to developing ways to increase the contributions of biological nitrogen fixation for crop production around the world.” ( Full Article ) Dr. Phil Bates’ lab published a paper in The Plant Cell . Its long been known that lipid substrates are trafficked between the chloroplast and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and are essential to leaf development, however the mechanisms of lipid trafficking between the two compartments has been unclear. Through the combined use of Arabidopsis mutants and in vivo lipid flux analysis we demonstrate that LPCAT1 and LPCAT2 enzymes are associated with chloroplast and are responsible for the incorporation of newly synthesized fatty acids directly into the ER membrane lipid phosphatidylcholine (PC). In addition, we demonstrate that there are at least three different pools of PC involved in different aspects of acyl trafficking between the ER and the chloroplast and produce a new model for leaf lipid flux. This work was also recently recommended as a significant update on the understanding leaf lipid metabolism by F1000 (Feussner I and Zienkiewicz A: F1000Prime Recommendation of [Karki N et al., Plant Cell 2019 31(11):2768-2788]. In F1000Prime, 15 Jan 2020; https://doi.org/10.3410/f.736596500.793569434 ). At the IBC Holiday Party in December 2019, the following graduate students received awards: Sharol Schmidt in Dr. Andrei Smertenko’s Lab received a 2019-2020 Helen and Loyal H. Davis Fellowship. This Research Fellowship consists of a stipend for calendar year 2020 and a cash award of $3,000 to spend for travel to a professional conference and/or research supplies. Alex Alleman in Dr. John Peters’ Lab received a 2019-2020 John & Maggie McDougall Scholarship. The Scholarship carries a cash award of $3,000 to spend for travel to a professional conference and/or research supplies. Sajina Bandari in Dr. Phil Bates’ Lab, Joshua Polito in Dr. Mark Lange’s Lab, and Hsin-Hua (Joelle) Wu in Dr. John Peters’ Lab received the Clarence “Bud” Ryan Institute of Biological Chemistry Travel Scholarship for the 2019-2020 academic year in the amount of $1500. The travel scholarships were made possible through a endowment gift by Pat Ryan (wife of the late Bud Ryan). The following faculty and staff received service awards: 5 years: Daniel Tejeda Lunn 10 Years: Ruifeng He and Helmut Kirchhoff. Not pictured Anna Berim and David Gang. 15 Years: Iris Lange 40 Years: Mike Kahn Professor John Peters in collaboration with Montana State University received a DOE-BES Physical Biosciences Grant “Novel microbial based enzymatic CO2 fixation mechanisms: Conformational control of enzymatic reactivity”, for $1,472,456 for three years. The collaborative project is providing an understanding of the mechanisms of unique carboxylation and electron transfer reactions. An integrated approach is used combining mechanistic enzymology, spectroscopy, and structural work to link mechanistic steps with defined conformational changes that promote high fidelity catalysis of difficult reactions having unstable intermediates. Within the context of the mission of the Department of Energy and the core activities of the Energy Biosciences, the results obtained in the study will reveal new insights into these novel carboxylation reactions and will provide the basis for the comparison of the mechanisms of these interesting enzymes to other well-characterized CO 2 fixing and carboxylating enzymes. Dr. Tom Okita has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as an AAAS Fellow is a distinction bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers, in recognition of scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science and its applications. AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science ( www.sciencemag.org ). An international group of scientists, including Dr. Mark Lange at the Institute of Biological Chemistry, received a $4 million grant from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, part of the National Institutes of Health, to work on developing novel approaches for the production of taxol, on...