Researchers at the University of Georgia have discovered two proteins that play a critical role in the formation of this fundamental component of plant life, opening the doors for a new toolkit that may one day help scientists engineer improved plants for biofuels, construction materials, medicine and food production.
"The scientific community has identified a large number of proteins that the plant uses to assemble its cell walls, but it has been very difficult to identify those few proteins that are directly involved in the construction of key polysaccharides like xylan," said Will York, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in UGA's Complex Carbohydrate Research Center and principal investigator of a CCRC research team that recently published the paper describing its results in The Plant Journal.