Vardis Ntoukakis Flashcards

Question

Fungicide sensor

Answer 1

ABA is another important hormone like Auxin. When ABA is present, a phosphatase interacts with a protein so it cannot dephosphorylate a kinase, which means phosphorylation and signalling can occur. Mandipropamid is a fungicide. It looks like ABA. The receptor was changed to recognise the fungicide, which the wildtype doesn’t. This meant that the fungicide can activate ABA responses. So it was a plant pathway that was modified and stayed in plants.

Answer 2

Receptors that detect multiple pathogens that are not closely related. Plant microbe interactions – make plants detect pathogens. Bacteria try to put proteases inside a plant host to take over. But plants have an immune receptor to detect it and cleave it. They tried to make a receptor to detect other proteases as well. They identified the cleavage site of the bacterial effector protein, where it is cleaved. Made it so that it can be cleaved by other proteins from viruses and fungi.

Answer 3

Dhurrin Artemisinin Golden rice

Answer 4

Dhurrin is an insect repellent and poison. Cytochrome P450 produces Dhurrin in the ER. Energy is made in the chloroplast in plants. They wanted to relocate this complex from the ER into the chloroplast membrane. If you do that, you can increase the production of dhurrin. They changed signal peptide to send it to the ER.

Answer 5

Plants produce artemisinic acid. They found the biosynthetic pathway for it and put it in yeast so it can produce artemisinic acid. You can just take three enzymes and put it in yeast, which is easy. Difficult to control localisation, substrate, is yeast happy with artemisinic acid etc. So those three enzymes can make the precursor but not in an effective way. It is still easier to get from plants.

Answer 6

Lack of beta-carotene in Asian food. They wanted to put enzymes from bacteria or plants and put it in rice to increase its beta-carotene content. Was done successfully but government wasn’t happy with GMO.

Answer 7

Mix different bacteria strains to see which grows best on the roots of aradopsis. They selected the fast growers and tested which would best increase the phosphorus content of plants. Mixed different strains to get the best outcome. They established certain rules to predict composition of communities. This means you don’t have to go through testing cycle to increase phosphorus content.

Answer 8

It was found that when adding antibiotics to bacteria, 1% survived. They let that one grow and tried again and still 1% survived, showing that it was not a mutation that created resistance. It was bacterial transcriptional noise. This is evident in unicellular organisms. Investigating noise would let us know if noise follows the same rules in multicellular organisms. If you look at the exact same cell types and locations, ask if they have differences i.e. noise. They looked at young and mature leaves to see if noise stops but found that there is always noise. Certain cells have bursty transcription and others don’t. Cells of the same cell fate in plants still experience noise. Promoters do not control transcriptional noise. Plants are highly plastic so their cell fates can change easily under stimuli, but mammals don’t have this.

Answer 9

They created a lipid bilayer. They embedded photosystem II (PSII from electron transport chain). They purified it from peanuts and embedded it. Did the same with ATP synthase. Took the proton pump from another bacterium and embedded it. the proton pump and PSII are photoconverters. They react to light. PSII splits water and gives you protons. Protons go through ATP synthase to make ATP. So light causes ATP synthesis. They wanted a switch to turn it on and off. The proton pump puts protons back on the other side of the membrane. They made it so red light creates energy and green light stops energy production. They coupled this with actin polymerisation. So one protein from plants, two from bacteria and put it in the membrane and controlled energy production with red and green light.

Answer 10

- all pathways in plants are interconnected - they have DNA in multiple organelles - they have huge genomes - they are polyploidic - they have distal transcriptional enhancers

Answer 11

Plants have cytoplasmic connections between cells so processes like immune response and growth are linked. If we want to make plants more resistant to pathogens, then tuning immunity could prevent growth

Answer 12

They have the chloroplast and chromoplast which have their own DNA. Proteins encoded in nuclear DNA and chloroplastic DNA come together in the same organelles so hard to coordinate.

Answer 13

It means plants have gene redundancy and duplication. There are a lot of genes we don't know the function of or that we think have no function. It means when transforming plants, you have no idea where the gene will go.

Answer 14

It means there are 6 copies of the same genome, and within that you have multiple copies of the same gene so you have 12 copies of one gene

Answer 15

This is regulation of transcription of far-away sequences. | This and chromatin packing correlate with the genomic and epigenomic landscapes - makes things very complicated

Answer 16

multicellular organism; cells are different, there are different layers that are well defined with different cell types. Gene expression is different because of different transcription factors present in every cell type. When expressing something, what will happen if all the cells get a different identity?

Answer 17

The stigma around GMO – no one minds that insulin is produced from GM e. coli but GM apples are wrong. Perhaps because food is close to us.

Vardis Ntoukakis Flashcards

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