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Update on the biochemistry of chlorophyll breakdown

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Abstract

In land plants, chlorophyll is broken down to colorless linear tetrapyrroles in a highly conserved multi-step pathway. The pathway is termed the ‘PAO pathway’, because the opening of the chlorine macrocycle present in chlorophyll catalyzed by pheophorbide a oxygenase (PAO), the key enzyme of the pathway, provides the characteristic structural basis found in all further downstream chlorophyll breakdown products. To date, most of the biochemical steps of the PAO pathway have been elucidated and genes encoding many of the chlorophyll catabolic enzymes been identified. This review summarizes the current knowledge on the biochemistry of the PAO pathway and provides insight into recent progress made in the field that indicates that the pathway is more complex than thought in the past.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Bernhard Kräutler from the University of Innsbruck, Austria for many stimulating discussions and the long-term and extremely fruitful collaboration between his and my own group. My work on chlorophyll breakdown is financially supported by grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the National Center of Competence in Research Plant Survival, a research program of the Swiss National Science Foundation, and CropLife, an European FP7 Marie-Curie Initial Training Network project.

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  1. Institute of Plant Biology, University of Zurich, Zollikerstrasse 107, 8008, Zurich, Switzerland

    Stefan Hörtensteiner

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Hörtensteiner, S. Update on the biochemistry of chlorophyll breakdown. Plant Mol Biol 82, 505–517 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-012-9940-z

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