Brookhaven research shows retaining sugars in plant leaves can boost oil production

In New York state, in a new study at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists show that retaining sugars in plant leaves can make them get fat too.

In plants, this extra fat accumulation could be a good thing. It could help turn plants into factories for making biofuels and other useful chemicals. But you can’t just feed plants cookies and donuts to get leaves to pump out more oil.

To tip the balance in favor of higher oil production and accumulation in leaves—which would be more abundant and accessible than seeds for making bio-based chemicals—the scientists needed detailed knowledge of the biochemical processes that drive the metabolic pathways and the genes that control them. As described in a paper published in the journal Plant Physiology, the Brookhaven team selectively bred plants to combine a series of traits that blocked some of the sugar transport and conversion pathways, which resulted in increased oil production and accumulation.