A place in the sun

To secure their place in the sun, plants direct their growth resources toward stem elongation and away from bulking up harvestable portions such as leaves and seeds. “If all else fails, the plants put out what I like to call a premature ‘desperation flower’ to produce at least a couple of seeds that might find better growing conditions during the next season,” explains Chory.

In an earlier study, Chory had confirmed the existence of a separate molecular pathway that plants use to adjust their growth and flowering time to shade. But the molecular events linking the detection of changes in light quality to changes in growth patterns were still poorly understood.

To identify genes that are involved in the shade avoidance syndrome, first author Yi Tao, a postdoctoral researcher in Chory’s lab, searched a collection of mutated Arabidopsis thaliana seedlings for plants that no longer responded to crowded growth conditions. Like many commercially grown crops, Arabidopsis — the lab rat of plant biologists — doesn’t tolerate shade well.

She identified a handful of genes that play a role in the shade response, one of which encoded an enzyme similar to alliinase, the enzyme that produces the characteristic flavor of onion, garlic and other members of the Alliaceae plant family. To predict the function of the newly identified enzyme, Chory turned to her Salk colleague Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Joseph P. Noel, Ph.D, director of the Jack H. Skirball Center for Chemical Biology and Proteomics.

Although Arabidopsis lacks garlic’s pungency, Noel could model the newly discovered enzyme’s structure based on the already-known, three-dimensional structure of alliinase. “The active site chemically resembled a nook and cranny likely to bind the amino acid tryptophan,” says Noel. “That’s when it became really exciting since we knew that plants can use tryptophan to synthesize auxin.”

After virtual biochemistry led the way, real-life biochemistry confirmed that the enzyme indeed uses tryptophan to catalyze the first reaction in a three-step auxin-synthesis pathway and the new enzyme became known as tryptophan aminotransferase of Arabidopsis, or TAA1 for short.