Research area
Plants produce a multitude of complex metabolites to navigate their interaction with the environment, e.g. as defense compounds. Some of these compounds are used by humans for medicine, food supplements, color pigments etc, while others are important determinants of crop plants’ nutritional value for humans and fodder crops for animals. For a number of years I have been investigating the physiological roles and catabolism of cyanogenic glycosides, mainly using the crop plant sorghum as a model, but also Lotus japonicus, cassava, barley and almond. Cyanogenic glycosides serve important roles in plants as deterrents of attack from herbivores and microorganisms. However, they also serve other, less investigated, roles in plants, and most of my research has focused on elucidating these functions and the associated enzymatic pathways. This work has caused me to frequently discover atypical enzymatic functions, one of them a reductive cleavage reaction carried out by glutathione transferase enzymes (GSTs) in a pathway for recovery of nitrogen from cyanogenic glucosides. The enzyme family of GSTs is large and complex and with very few identified physiological functions. With a young investigator grant from the VILLUM Foundation my group focus on revealing other functions of GSTs in specialized metabolism.