Impact of specific long-chain-acyl-CoA synthetases on plant development

尽管有各种各样的高通量分子技术和生物信息学，但对单个蛋白质的生物学作用的了解仍然远未完成。拟议的项目旨在为参与脂肪酸新陈代谢的这种未确定特征的蛋白质贡献知识。具体地说，将评估某些长链-酰基-辅酶A合成酶(LACS)在植物脂肪代谢中的作用。某些LACS突变等位基因引起的脂肪组成的变化似乎对植物的形态和发育有很大的影响。在这个项目中，我们将重点研究LACS基因，这些基因目前还没有确定的生物学作用。通过突变分析，我们将剖析个体LACS对脂类代谢变化的贡献，最终影响植物的发育。突变的表型将根据脂质成分的生化变化以及对细胞和组织水平的结构的影响进行分析。总的目标将是建立一个模型，解释观察到的形态表型的分子基础。

Despite a wide variety of high-throughput molecular techniques and bioinformatics the understanding of the biological role of individual proteins is still far from being complete. The proposed project aims on contributing knowledge to such uncharacterized proteins involved in the fatty acid metabolism. Specifically, the role of certain long-chain-acyl-CoA synthetases (LACS) on the plant lipid metabolism will be evaluated. Changes in lipid composition provoked by certain LACS mutant alleles seem to impact plant morphology and plant development substantially. In this project we will focus on LACS genes with so far uncharacterized biological roles. By means of mutant analyses we will dissect the contribution of individual LACS to changes in lipid metabolism finally affecting plant development. Mutant phenotypes will be analyzed with respect to biochemical changes of the lipid composition and to the impact on structure on cellular and tissue level. The overall goal will be the establishment of a model explaining the molecular basis for the observed morphological phenotypes.