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Grant recipient

Tomas Laursen

The language of plant metabolic highways
Grant amount: DKK 9,999,938

Plants are the supreme chemists that hold the key to ensure a future sustainable supply of medicine, food and energy. Plants sense and communicate with their environment using an elaborate “language” composed of a remarkable diversity of bioactive compounds. Specific production of such compounds involves on-demand assembly of enzyme complexes, metabolons, which facilitate the formation of metabolic highways. “The language of plant metabolic highways” focuses on elucidating how plants orchestrate the formation of metabolons. Our recently developed method for isolation of intact metabolons enables unprecedented snapshot analyses of their composition. This, in combination with single molecule microscopy will provide a unique insight into the dynamic metabolic machinery of plants. This has the potential to fundamentally change our view of how plants produce the remarkable diversity of bioactive compounds and bridges the knowledge-gap currently impeding optimized bio-production in microorganisms.

Tomas Laursen
PhD and Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences
University of Copenhagen