Scientists are using AlphaFold of their research to strengthen an enzyme that’s vital to photosynthesis, paving the way in which for more heat-tolerant crops.
As global warming accompanies more droughts and heatwaves, harvests of some staple crops are shrinking. But less visible is what is going on inside these plants, where high heat can break down the molecular machinery that keeps them alive.
At the center of that machinery lies a sun-powered process that supports virtually all life on Earth: photosynthesis. Plants use photosynthesis to supply the glucose that fuels their growth via an intricate choreography of enzymes inside plant cells. As global temperatures rise, that choreography can falter.
Berkley Walker, an associate professor at Michigan State University, spends his days eager about how one can keep that choreography in step. “Nature already holds the blueprints for a lot of enzymes that may handle heat,” he says. “Our job is to learn from those examples and construct that very same resilience into the crops we rely upon.”
Walker’s lab focuses on a significant enzyme in photosynthesis called glycerate kinase (GLYK), an enzyme that helps plants recycle carbon during photosynthesis.One hypothesis is that, if it gets too hot, GLYK stops working, and photosynthesis fails.
Walker’s team set out to know why. Since the structure of GLYK has never been determined experimentally, they turned to AlphaFold to predict its 3D shape, not only in plants but additionally in a heat-loving algae that thrives in volcanic hot springs. By taking AlphaFold’s predicted shapes and plugging them into sophisticated molecular simulations, the researchers could watch as these enzymes flexed and twisted because the temperature rose.
That’s when the issue got here into focus: three flexible loops within the plant version of GLYK wobbled off form at high heat.
Experiments alone could never deliver such insights, says Walker: “AlphaFold enabled access to experimentally unavailable enzyme structures and helped us discover key sections for modification.”
Armed with this information, the researchers in Walker’s lab made a series of hybrid enzymes that replaced the unstable loops within the plant GLYK with more rigid ones borrowed from the algae’s GLYK. One among these performed spectacularly, remaining stable at temperatures as much as 65 °C.
