title: Starch phosphorylation plays an important role in starch biosynthesis.
abstract: Starch phosphate esters are crucial in starch metabolism and render valuable functionality to starches for various industrial applications. A potato glucan, water dikinase (GWD1) was introduced in tubers of two different potato genetic backgrounds: an amylose-containing line Kardal and the amylose-free mutant amf. In both backgrounds, this resulted in two contrasting effects, a number of plants showed higher phosphate content compared to the respective control, while others lines exhibited lower phosphate content, thereby generating two series of starches with broad-scale variation in phosphate content. The results of systematic analyses on these two series of starches revealed that starch phosphate content strongly influenced starch granule morphology, amylose content, starch fine structure, gelatinization characteristics and freeze-thaw stability of starch gels. Further analyses on the expression level of genes involved in starch metabolism suggested that starch phosphorylation regulates starch synthesis by controlling the carbon flux into starch while simultaneously modulating starch-synthesizing genes.
authors.affiliation: Wageningen UR Plant Breeding, Wageningen University and Research, P.O. Box 386, 6700 AJ Wageningen, The Netherlands; National Centre for Vegetable Improvement (Central China), Key Laboratory of Horticultural Plant Biology, Ministry of Education, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China. Electronic address: xuan.xu@wur.nl.
authors.forename: Xuan
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Wageningen UR Plant Breeding, Wageningen University and Research, P.O. Box 386, 6700 AJ Wageningen, The Netherlands. Electronic address: dianka.dees@wur.nl.
authors.forename: Dianka
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Dees
authors.affiliation: Wageningen UR Plant Breeding, Wageningen University and Research, P.O. Box 386, 6700 AJ Wageningen, The Netherlands. Electronic address: annemarie.dechesne@wur.nl.
authors.forename: Annemarie
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dechesne
authors.affiliation: Wageningen UR Plant Breeding, Wageningen University and Research, P.O. Box 386, 6700 AJ Wageningen, The Netherlands. Electronic address: Xingfeng.Huang@colostate.edu.
authors.forename: Xing-Feng
authors.initials: XF
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Wageningen UR Plant Breeding, Wageningen University and Research, P.O. Box 386, 6700 AJ Wageningen, The Netherlands. Electronic address: richard.visser@wur.nl.
authors.forename: Richard G F
authors.initials: RGF
authors.lastname: Visser
authors.affiliation: Wageningen UR Plant Breeding, Wageningen University and Research, P.O. Box 386, 6700 AJ Wageningen, The Netherlands. Electronic address: luisa.trindade@wur.nl.
authors.forename: Luisa M
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Trindade
mesh_terms: D000688:Amylose / Q000737:chemistry*; D010766:Phosphorylation; D011198:Solanum tuberosum / Q000737:chemistry*; D013213:Starch / Q000096:biosynthesis*
chemical_list: D013213:Starch; D000688:Amylose
keywords: Freeze-thaw stability; Glucan; Starch metabolism; Starch phosphate content; Storage starch; Water dikinase