Abstract
The carbohydrate active enzyme (CAZy) database is an invaluable resource for glycobiology and currently contains 45 glycosyltransferase families that are represented in plants. Glycosyltransferases (GTs) have many functions in plants, but the majority are likely to be involved in biosynthesis of polysaccharides and glycoproteins in the plant cell wall. Bioinformatic approaches and structural modeling suggest that a number of protein families in plants include GTs that have not yet been identified as such and are therefore not included in CAZy. These families include proteins with domain of unknown function (DUF) DUF23, DUF246, and DUF266. The evidence for these proteins being GTs and their possible roles in cell wall biosynthesis is discussed.
Highlights
Plant cell walls contain structural polysaccharides such as cellulose, hemicelluloses, and pectins
Whereas many GTBs are found to be independent of a metal ion for catalysis, most GT-A enzymes contains a conserved DxD motif that coordinates the phosphate atoms of the nucleotide donors via coordination
About 1.7% of the 27,416 protein coding Arabidopsis genes are represented among 42 GT families in the database, but less than 20% of these sequences, have been annotated to date (Caffall and Mohnen, 2009; Scheller and Ulvskov, 2010) and very few of the GTs involved in cell wall biosynthesis have had their biochemical activity unambiguously demonstrated
Summary
Plant cell walls contain structural polysaccharides such as cellulose, hemicelluloses, and pectins. GTs have been further classified into families on the basis of amino acid sequence similarities in the carbohydrate active enzyme (CAZy) database1 (Cantarel et al, 2009).
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