Oliver+Yu+Feb.+10

The paper you will discuss with Oliver Yu on February 10th is:   GLYCOALKALOID METABOLISM1 Is Required for Steroidal Alkaloid Glycosylation and Prevention of Phytotoxicity in Tomato Plant Cell 2011 23 : 4507 - 4525 . First Published on December 16, 2011. > <span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: Verdana,Helvetica,Arial; font-size: 14px;">__[]__ __http://www.plantcell.org.libproxy.wustl.edu/content/23/12/4507.full.pdf+html__

Note from Barbara: If you are on campus, you should have free access to the Plant Cell through the Wash U library, using the second URL. Oliver's Questions to help you prepare for the discussion on Friday: __For the Discussion leader:__ __Questions for Everyone__: 1. What are the reported health benefits of consuming plant sterols and saponins? (No metabolic details are necessary).
 * 1) Is there any difference between plant and animal cholesterol biosynthesis pathway? A comparison of the pathway maps will be enough for our discussion.
 * 2) What’s the pathway from cholesterol to tomatidine? Of all the pathway enzymes, which ones are enzymatically identified? Which ones are putatively identified? Which ones are still unknown? (This is for our discussion leader to go deeper into the background, hope this information will help us understand Figure 1 better)
 * 3) Other than the SA pathway discussed here, are any other plant pathway enzymes clustered in the genome? (Using keyword search at PubMed will turn up several reviews. Just find one or two examples will be nice).

2. What experiments are generally required to “functionally characterize” an enzyme? In this paper, which kind of data have been provided to demonstrate its function and what data are still missing?

3. Why do defects in SA biosynthesis cause developmental defects?

4. Why is tomatidine toxic to Arabidopsis?

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