<p>One promising approach to balance the need for fertilizer and the welfare of the environment, is the development of plants that can fix atmospheric nitrogen independently. This innovation would not only reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers and manure but also help mitigate climate change and the nitrogen crisis. <strong>To this end, we first need to better study the nitroplast, how it interacts with the host organism and how it could be potentially introduced into other cells</strong>.</p>
<p>It has been discovered that, to ensure the endosymbiotic relationship, several proteins that are essential to UCYN-A are expressed in the host, <em>B. bigelowii</em>, and imported into the symbiont, similar to chloroplasts and mitochondria, though to a lesser extent <ahref="#cite11"style="color: #185A4F;">[11]</a>. Many of these proteins possess specialized localization peptides that direct their cellular function. In UCYN-A, these peptides are usually a C-terminal extension and are known as the “uTP” (UCYN-A Transit Peptide), although not yet identified <ahref="#cite11"style="color: #185A4F;">[11]</a>. Our first aim was to employ bioinformatics analyses to identify the characteristic <strong>motifs required for a protein to be imported by UCYN-A</strong>. For this, we made use of host (<em>B. bigelowii</em>) and nitroplast (UCYN-A) genome data as well as the proteomics data published by Coale <em>et al.</em>. <strong>We identified 2 putative uTP sequences with high likelihood, which we named uTP1 and uTP2</strong>.</p>
...
...
@@ -91,7 +91,7 @@
</div>
<p>Our project <strong>lays the foundation for the transplantation of nitroplast</strong> into eukaryotic hosts. The emergence of nitrogen-fixing plants could lead to a significant drop in the demand for fertilizers, and consequently in both carbon emissions and nitrogen pollution.</p>
