Scientists have discovered the gene that enables marine algae to make a unique type of chlorophyll. They successfully implanted this gene in a land plant, paving the way for better crop yields on less land.
Finding the gene solves a long-standing mystery amongst scientists about the molecular pathways that allow the algae to manufacture this chlorophyll and survive.
The researchers initially set out to gain insight into an algae species that lives in coral. These algae manufacture sugars and share them with their coral hosts."Each coral colony has thousands of polyps, and their brown color is from the algae. Whenever you see coral bleaching, it's due to the loss of the algae," Xiang said.
As luck would have it, by using next-generation DNA sequencing and a lot of data analysis, the researchers were also able to use the mutants to discover the gene responsible for chlorophyllgene was not the initial goal of our work. We made the mutants for another reason, but I guess we were just lucky," Xiang said., the researchers are hopeful that the work could eventually help stem the tide of coral bleaching seen worldwide.
Robert E. Jinkerson, Daniel Poveda-Huertes, Elizabeth C. Cooney, Anna Cho, Rocio Ochoa-Fernandez, Patrick J. Keeling, Tingting Xiang, Johan Andersen-Ranberg.All land plants originated from a single evolutionary event when freshwater algae got a foothold on land. The group of algae that would later give rise to land plants had already been living in ...
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