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Most people know pectin as a common household gelling agent used for making jams, jellies, and jellybeans, but it also has anticancer properties and plays a vital role in plant growth and development.
Now, researchers at the University of Georgia have discovered a gene that encodes one of the proteins responsible for making pectin. It’s a finding that could help researchers understand—and ultimately manipulate—pectins to help plants better grow and fight off disease. The finding could also potentially be used to create new pectins with more powerful anticancer activities.
“We could, for instance, modify a pectic structure to get a specific biological effect,” said lead researcher Debra Mohnen of the UGA department of biochemistry and molecular biology and the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center. “The ability to modify pectin synthesis could have huge ramifications.”
The research finding was published this month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). In a commentary on the article, Antony Bacic of the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics at the University of Melbourne called the accomplishment “a crucial breakthrough in pectin biosynthesis.”
The UGA researchers discovered the gene and the protein it encodes while searching the genetic map database for a common laboratory plant in the mustard family, Arabidopsis thaliana. The team named the gene galacturonosyltransferase-1 or GAUT1 for short.
While this first step may well be a crucial one in elucidating other pectin-coding genes, study co-author Michael Hahn said the research is still at the bottom rung of the ladder. But for the first time, the team has the genetic tools that should help identify multiple genes involved in pectin biosynthesis.
He described the current finding as, “the first word of the Rosetta Stone that will show us the blueprint for pectin biosynthesis.”
In his commentary, Bacic points out the large number of pectin uses – from food production to cancer prevention and treatment – and notes that more information on the process of manipulating the quality and quantity of cell wall components such as pectin is crucial and badly needed.
“The identification of GAUT1 and the GAUT1-related gene family provides the molecular tools to begin to break through the bottleneck of our understanding of pectin synthesis,” Bacic wrote.
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Most people know pectin as a common household gelling agent used for making jams, jellies and jellybeans, but it also has anticancer properties and plays a vital role in plant growth and development.
