Vice President Andrew H.-J. Wang and his research team from the Institute of Biological Chemistry (IBC) have detailed the structure of an enzyme involved in the production of the scent given off by the mint plant. Their research was published in the journal, The Plant Cell, on February 5, 2010.

The volatiles that evaporate from plants to produce scents are very important in nature to attract pollinators and herbivorous predators and emit signals that ward off pathogens. They are also of interest to humans as medicines; however, as yet, very little is known about them.

In an effort to better understand the process by which the mint plant produces scent, Academician Wang and his team used x-ray crystallography, biochemistry, and genetics to solve the structure of an enzyme that catalyzes the first critical step in the biosynthesis pathway of the mint scent formation. The group discovered that the enzyme is composed of two different proteins: a catalytic protein and a regulatory protein. Through protein-protein interactions, the regulatory protein can remodel the active-site cavity of the catalytic protein for synthesizing the precursor of menthol which is released from the plant as mint scent.

The research was conducted and financed by Academia Sinica and the provision of the protein crystallography synchrotron facility was supported by the National Genomic Medicine Research Program, a project funded by the National Science Council.

The full-text article entitled “Structure of a Heterotetrameric Geranyl Pyrophosphate Synthase from Mint (Mentha piperita) Reveals Intersubunit Regulation” is available online at The Plant Cell website: http://www.plantcell.org/cgi/content/abstract/tpc.109.071738v1

The complete list of authors of the article is: Tao-Hsin Chang, Fu-Lien Hsieh, Tzu-Ping Ko, Kuo-Hsun Teng, Po-Huang Liang, and Andrew H.-J. Wang, all from the IBC. (Hsieh and Teng were postgraduates from National Taiwan University when they took part in the project.)