Affiliations 

  • 1 Graduate School of Bio-Applications and Systems Engineering, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Tokyo, Japan
  • 2 Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
  • 3 Department of Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
  • 4 US Department of Energy, Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, Wisconsin Energy Institute, Madison, WI, USA
  • 5 Department of Bioengineering, Nagaoka University of Technology, Niigata, Japan
  • 6 Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, Ibaraki, Japan
  • 7 Center for Sustainable Resource Science, RIKEN, Kanagawa, Japan
  • 8 Malaysia-Japan International Institute of Technology, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 9 Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
  • 10 College of Bioresource Sciences, Nihon University, Fujisawa, Japan
Plant Biotechnol J, 2015 Aug;13(6):821-32.
PMID: 25580543 DOI: 10.1111/pbi.12316

Abstract

Bacteria-derived enzymes that can modify specific lignin substructures are potential targets to engineer plants for better biomass processability. The Gram-negative bacterium Sphingobium sp. SYK-6 possesses a Cα-dehydrogenase (LigD) enzyme that has been shown to oxidize the α-hydroxy functionalities in β-O-4-linked dimers into α-keto analogues that are more chemically labile. Here, we show that recombinant LigD can oxidize an even wider range of β-O-4-linked dimers and oligomers, including the genuine dilignols, guaiacylglycerol-β-coniferyl alcohol ether and syringylglycerol-β-sinapyl alcohol ether. We explored the possibility of using LigD for biosynthetically engineering lignin by expressing the codon-optimized ligD gene in Arabidopsis thaliana. The ligD cDNA, with or without a signal peptide for apoplast targeting, has been successfully expressed, and LigD activity could be detected in the extracts of the transgenic plants. UPLC-MS/MS-based metabolite profiling indicated that levels of oxidized guaiacyl (G) β-O-4-coupled dilignols and analogues were significantly elevated in the LigD transgenic plants regardless of the signal peptide attachment to LigD. In parallel, 2D NMR analysis revealed a 2.1- to 2.8-fold increased level of G-type α-keto-β-O-4 linkages in cellulolytic enzyme lignins isolated from the stem cell walls of the LigD transgenic plants, indicating that the transformation was capable of altering lignin structure in the desired manner.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.