Massachusetts Institute of Technology : Scientists identify a plant molecule that sops up iron-rich heme; The peptide is used by legumes to control nitrogen-fixing bacteria; it may also offer leads for treating patients with too much heme in their blood. ...

ENPNewswire-August 12, 2022--Massachusetts Institute of Technology : Scientists identify a plant molecule that sops up iron-rich heme; The peptide is used by legumes to control nitrogen-fixing bacteria; it may also offer leads for treating patients with too much heme in their blood.

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Release date- 11082022 - Symbiotic relationships between legumes and the bacteria that grow in their roots are critical for plant survival. Without those bacteria, the plants would have no source of nitrogen, an element that is essential for building proteins and other biomolecules, and they would be dependent on nitrogen fertilizer in the soil.

To establish that symbiosis, some legume plants produce hundreds of peptides that help bacteria live within structures known as nodules within their roots. A new study from MIT reveals that one of these peptides has an unexpected function: It sops up all available heme, an iron-containing molecule. This sends the bacteria into an iron-starvation mode that ramps up their production of ammonia, the form of nitrogen that is usable for plants.

'This is the first of the 700 peptides in this system for which a really detailed molecular mechanism has been worked out,' says Graham Walker, the American Cancer Society Research Professor of Biology at MIT, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, and the senior author of the study.

This heme-sequestering peptide could have beneficial uses in treating a variety of human diseases, the researchers say. Removing free heme from the blood could help to treat diseases caused by bacteria or parasites that need heme to survive, such as P. gingivalis (periodontal disease) or toxoplasmosis, or diseases such as sickle cell disease or sepsis that release too much heme into the bloodstream.

'This study demonstrates that basic research in plant-microbe interactions also has potential to be translated to therapeutic applications,' says Siva Sankari, an MIT research scientist and the lead author of the study, which appears today in Nature Microbiology.

Other authors of the paper include Vignesh Babu, an MIT research scientist; Kevin Bian and Mary Andorfer, both MIT postdocs; Areej Alhhazmi, a former KACST-MIT Ibn Khaldun Fellowship for Saudi Arabian Women scholar; Kwan Yoon and Dante Avalos, MIT graduate students; Tyler Smith, an MIT instructor in biology; Catherine Drennan, an MIT professor of chemistry and biology and a Howard Hughes...

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