The endosymbiosis event resulting in the plastid of photosynthetic eukaryotes was accompanied by the appearance of a novel form of storage polysaccharide in Rhodophyceae, Glaucophyta, and Chloroplastida. Previous analyses indicated that starch synthesis resulted from the merging of the cyanobacterial and the eukaryotic storage polysaccharide metabolism pathways. We performed a comparative bioin...

Mutations at the rug5 (rugosus5) locus have been used to elucidate the role of the major soluble isoform of starch synthase II (SSII) in amylopectin synthesis in the developing pea embryo. The SSII gene maps to the rug5 locus, and the gene in one of three rug5 mutant lines has been shown to carry a base pair substitution that introduces a stop codon into the open reading frame. All three mutant...

Accumulation of reserve materials in filling grains involves the coordination of different metabolic and cellular processes, and understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying the interconnections remains a major challenge for proteomics. Rice (Oryza sativa) is an excellent model for studying grain filling because of its importance as a staple food and the available genome sequence database....

The effects of replacing a digestible energy source from fat (fish oil) with carbohydrate (wheat starch) on performance, glycogenesis and de novo lipogenesis was examined in triplicate groups of juvenile gilthead sea bream (Sparus aurata), fed four extruded experimental diets. In order to trace the metabolic fate of dietary starch, 0.7% wheat starch was replaced with isotope-labelled starch (>9...

The mechanisms underlying starch granule initiation remain unknown. We have recently reported that mutation of soluble starch synthase IV (SSIV) in Arabidopsis thaliana results in restriction of the number of starch granules to a single, large, particle per plastid, thereby defining an important component of the starch priming machinery. In this work, we provide further evidence for the functio...

Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) produce exopolysaccharides (EPS) that are important for biofilm formation in the mammalian oral cavity and gastrointestinal tract. Sucrose is a well-known substrate for homo-EPS formation by Lactobacillus reuteri glucansucrases (GS). Starch is the main fermentable carbohydrate in the human diet, and often consumed simultaneously with sucrose. Recently we have characte...

Rosin, an abundant raw material from pine trees, was used as a starting material directly for the synthesis of rosin acid starch. The esterification reaction was catalyzed by lipase (Novozym 435) under mild conditions. Based on single factor experimentation, the optimal esterification conditions were obtained as follows: rosin acid/anhydrous glucose unit in the molar ratio 2:1, reaction time 4 ...

This work compared the molecular structures and physicochemical properties of starches obtained from chalky and translucent kernels of six rice cultivars. Starch samples were prepared according to a modified alkali steeping method. Crystallinity, pasting characteristics, and thermal properties were studied by X-ray diffraction, rapid viscosity analysis, and differential scanning calorimetry, re...

I n the experiment reported here an attempt has been made to determine whether rats offered a free choice between two compound diets, identical except in their starch content and both deficient in the vitamin B complex, would select the one on which they could synthesize the required vitamins by refection. In the process of refection, first investigated by Fridericia (1926), rats are able to ut...

Plants have duplicate versions of the oxidative pentose phosphate pathway (oxPPP) enzymes with a subset localized to the chloroplast. The chloroplast oxPPP provides NADPH and pentose sugars for multiple metabolic pathways. This study identified two loss-of-function alleles of the Zea mays (maize) chloroplast-localized oxPPP enzyme 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase (6PGDH). These mutations caused...