The study conducted provides a comprehensive insight into sugar uptake into plant organs such as flowers, seeds and fruit

Aarhus University researchers have just elucidated structures of a sugar transport protein that drives transport of sugar in plants. The study provides a comprehensive insight into sugar uptake into plant organs such as flowers, seeds and fruit. Future research can benefit from these discoveries to address challenges like food security through crop improvement.

The results are a continuation of earlier research at Associate Professor Bjørn Panyella Pedersen’s research group at the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. A major challenge to make progress in the field is to obtain structures of Sugar Transport Proteins (STPs) in different conformations.

PhD Student and first author Laust Bavnhøj explains: “The STPs are highly dynamic membrane proteins that undergoes large conformational changes during transport. This flexibility present a great challenge as conformational stabilisation is needed in order to facilitate structure solution by X-ray crystallography. This challenge was exacerbated because we needed the transporter in a very specific conformation in order to answer our questions. Based on our previous work, we could design mutants that worked to destabilise an outward facing conformation. This allowed us to break the “conformational dead water” and push our protein into a new inward facing conformation.”

“Combining these methods, we were able to not only identify key elements involved in the transport cycle within STPs but also provide new evidence for regulatory mechanisms conserved within the sugar porter family across all kingdoms of life,” says Bjørn Panyella Pedersen.