Genetic Analysis of Plant Cell Wall Matrix Components

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9728779 Reiter Lay Abstract The cell walls of plants play numerous protective and growth-regulating roles during the life cycle of a plant. Furthermore, plant cell wall material represents the most abundant renewable source of biomass on earth, and represents the raw material for many products such as wood, textiles and paper. Accordingly, the investigation of the synthesis of plant cell walls is of considerable interest both from a basic and applied point of view. Plant cell walls consist of many different components such as cellulose, pectins, and many minor polysaccharide and protein components. Although most of the photosynthetically fixed carbon is ultimately incorporated into the polysaccharides of the cells wall, the biosynthetic pathways leading to the synthesis of these complex carbohydrates are poorly understood. This project utilizes a genetic approach to unravel the complexities of these in the model plant organism, Arabidopsis thaliana. The project will focus on two cell wall mutants, mur2 and mur3, which affect the bisynthesis of a class of important cell wall cross-linkers called xyloglucans. The mutants will be used to obtain the affected genes by so-called "positional cloning", a procedure that permits the isolation of genes based solely on their location within the genetic material. Once these genes involved in the synthesis of the plant cell wall polysaccharides have been obtained, they will be used to determine their function and to identify other components of the cell wall biosynthetic machinery in higher plants. In the long term, this knowledge is likely to permit the genetic manipulation of cell wall synthesis with the goal o f improving the properties of agriculturally important plants. ***