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Targeting phytic acid biosynthesis pathway in hexaploid wheat to enhance iron-bioavailability

This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

Inositol hexaphosphate (phytic acid; PA) is a well-known phosphate storage form that is accumulated in seeds of important cereal grains. PA has the ability to chelate major important micronutrients that includes Ca2+, Fe2+, Zn2+ etc. This ability to chelate micronutrient limits the bioavailability from cereal grains. Beside other approaches to enhance the iron bioavailability in cereal grains, attempts were also directed to reduce low-phytic-acid (lpa) in crops. Earlier, we identified the PA pathway genes from wheat those were functionally characterized in the yeast mutants and further RNAi lines were generated. Rice, Arabidopsis and maize protein sequences involved in the PA biosynthesis, were used to identify the orthologs genes from wheat genome. A putative wheat ABCC-MRP transporter involved in PA transport was also identified using lpa-1 sequence from maize and rice. Our data suggested that, PA gets accumulated during the seed maturation and genes responsible for these steps were also differentially regulated. Tissue specific mRNA accumulation was checked in wheat seeds and co-relation study was performed for micronutrient accumulation. TaIPK1 and TaABCC13 (TaMRP3) were used for functional validation using respective yeast mutants. Yeast complementation assays suggested that these genes are functional and could be important for gene silencing to achieve lpa-wheat. A binary vector based RNAi plant transformation vector was designed to target TaABCC13 and TaIPK1. These studies coupled with detailed expression characterization of PA pathway in wheat would provide an insight and develop resources to achieve low phytic acid wheat.