Pennycress, carbon wise: Labeling experiments reveal how pennycress seeds efficiently incorporate carbon into biomass

Abstract

Pennycress (Thlaspi arvense L.) is being developed as an oilseed cash cover crop for producing biofuels and value-added products as part of a sustainable carbonneutral future. An improved understanding of how pennycress embryos allocate photosynthate to biomass would help guide efforts to maximize and tailor seed oil production. To that end, Tsogtbaatar et al. (2020) fed pennycress embryos either 13C-labeled glucose or 13C-labeled glutamine, then quantified central carbon metabolism intermediates. Their data revealed that pennycress embryos are extremely efficient at converting substrates into biomass, due to key enzymatic activities that enable recapture of CO2, including the reversibility of isocitrate dehydrogenase and CO2 refixation by Rubisco.