PNNL

RICHLAND, Wash.— Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory teamed with colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory to reveal how some plants can sense sugar in their environment. Their latest study, published today in the journal Science Advances, describes how a particular protein controls whether the plant will invest in making oil, a potential source of biofuel, among other uses.

The study focuses on how the molecular machinery is regulated by a protein that senses the level of sugar, which plants use to fuel their activities.

“This paper reveals the detailed mechanism that tells plant cells, ‘we have lots of sugar,’ and then how that signaling affects the biochemical pathways that trigger processes like plant growth and oil production,” said Brookhaven Lab biochemist Jantana Blanford, the study’s co-lead author.

Blanford and her colleagues teamed with PNNL computational chemists Marcel Baer and Simone Raugei to examine at the atomic level how the protein, called KIN10, works at a molecular level.

“By using multiscale modeling, we observed that the protein can exist in multiple conformations but only one of them can effectively bind the sugar proxy,” said Baer, a co-lead author of the study.

The PNNL simulations identified key amino acids within the protein that control the binding of the sugar. These computational insights were then confirmed experimentally.

The combined body of experimental and computational information helped the scientists understand how interaction with the sugar proxy directly affects the downstream action of KIN10.

Learn more by reading Brookhaven Lab’s full news story.