Duke university is doing a study on a single gene may give perennial grasses more roots and speed up the timeline for creating bio fuels, Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (IGSP)Perennial grasses, switch grass and muskiness are bio fuels crops and they are taken up more than the others because they are easy to find.Philip Ben fey one of the director of the IGSP Center for Systems Biology also agreed with this theory.
"These biofuel crops usually can't be harvested until the second or third year," Benfey said. "A method to improve root growth could have a major role in reducing the time to harvest for warm season grasses."
That genome-wide search in the roots of the familiar laboratory plant Arabidopsis and screening of mutant lines turned up a single gene, which the researchers call UPBEAT1 (UPB1). Further study showed that UPB1 controls the gene expression of enzymes.
When the researchers disrupted UPB1 activity in the plant root, it messed up the radicals that cells delayed their differentiation and continued growing. Those plants ended up with faster-growing roots, having more and larger cells. When UPB1 activity was artificially increased, the growth of plant roots slowed.
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