Rachel Garlock
My semester project was a continuation of what I had been researching last spring. It involved assisting my graduate student mentor, Xinyu, with her investigation of three acyl carrier proteins (ACPs) that are found within energy producing organelles in plant cells, called the mitochondria. ACPs are found within all living organisms and aid in the process of fatty acid biosynthesis. However, the specific function of mitochondrial ACPs still needed to be investigated.
In order to discover more about these 3 ACPs, we generated various mutants of the model plant organism, Arabidopsis thaliana. Some of the plants had only one of the three ACPs nonfunctional, some had two, and some had three. We found that a majority of the single and double mutants did not have any differences in growth that were easily observable. They still appeared to grow in the same way relative to the wild type. However, when a triple mutant with three nonfunctional ACPs was generated, the plants were embryo-lethal, meaning that their seeds were aborted before they could start developing. This shows that plants need at least one functional copy of an ACP in order to survive.
We also investigated differences in what metabolites these mutants were producing. Metabolites are small molecules that organisms produce to fulfill their various needs. We predicted that there would be a difference in the content and concentrations of fatty acids within the mutants if we extracted and analyzed the metabolites that the plants produced. In this way, we were able to link the genetics of the plant with the appearance of it, using the information provided by their unique metabolite composition.
Overall, the outcomes of this project will allow for A. thaliana to be utilized as a representative organism for plants in future studies. This means that the results from this study can be applied to many other plant species in future research initiatives, allowing the possibility of engineering plants to produce certain desirable products. Most importantly, future researchers could alter ACPs expression and function in order to produce fatty acids that could be used to create biofuels.
Durati
Duration: 04/29/2019
Principal Investigator(s): Xinyi Fu