Plants have the incredible ability to produce their own food, thanks to chloroplasts. These organelles also help plants thrive in environments with low phosphate levels. One of the most impressive ways chloroplasts do this is by using galactolipids, which are lipids that don’t require phosphate.

Phosphate is a crucial nutrient for many cellular processes, including photosynthesis. However, many soils and environments have sub-optimal levels of phosphate, leading to poor plant growth and crop yield. Chloroplastic membranes thylakoid/envelope are the most abundant cellular membranes in plants. Galactolipids make up most of the glycerolipids in chloroplast membranes, accounting for over 80% of the total lipids. When phosphate levels are low, plants further break down phosphate lipids, phospholipids and increase the production of galactolipids. This process, called membrane lipid remodeling, enables plant cells to maintain their structural integrity and function even when phosphate is limited (Verma et al., 2021 Plant Physiology & Biochemistry).

Understanding and manipulating this intriguing display of cellular P reutilization is our strategy for generating environment-resilient crops. We are targeting several enzymes of this pathway like GDPDs (Mehra et al., Plant Cell & Environment), MGDGs (Verma et al., 2021; JXB) and DGDGs to understand their roles in rice using biochemistry, molecular biology, transgenesis and genome editing approach.