Genetic Dissection of Tryptophan Biosynthesis in Arabidopsis thaliana

A long term goal for this laboratory is to obtain a detailed understanding of the biochemical and genetic mechanisms that plants use to regulate the synthesis of the amino acid tryptophan (Last et al., 1992; Last, 1993). In addition to its role in the production of tryptophan for protein synthesis, this pathway gives rise to many indolic secondary metabolites, including the auxin, indole-3-acetic acid (Wright et al., 1991) and the Arabidopsis phytoallexin called camalexin (Tsuji et al., 1992). Thus, we anticipate that plants regulate the enzymes of tryptophan biosynthesis in response to requirements for both protein and secondary product biosynthesis.