Award details

Evolution of plant metabolic pathways

Reference	BBS/E/J/00000999
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Dr Joanne Dicks
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors
Institution	John Innes Centre
Department	John Innes Centre Department
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	1,347,599
Status	Completed
Type	Institute Project
Start date	01/04/1997
End date	31/05/2012
Duration	182 months

Abstract

We are taking computational approaches to understand how metabolic pathways have evolved in plants. Increased knowledge of plant metabolic evolution may lead to optimisation of current plant products and discovery of new natural products. Two current pathways of particular interest are the starch biosynthetic primary metabolic pathway in grasses and the avenacin secondary metabolic pathway in oat. Approaches include both computational examination of individual genes and gene families, genome context analysis, and comparisons between genes and gene families. More generally, we are interested in uncovering the relative importance of different mechanisms of secondary metabolite evolution in plants. For example, we are becoming aware of a growing number of gene clusters encoding secondary metabolites. We hypothesise that gene clusters may be the result of a rapid accumulation of duplicated genes in subtelomeric genomic regions. We wish to understand whether such a mechanism could be a frequent method of secondary metabolite birth for plants in general and a specific method for particular plant secondary metabolites.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Closed Committee - Genes & Developmental Biology (GDB)
Research Topics	Plant Science, Technology and Methods Development
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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