Volume 199 (1981), pp. 67–74
The recent discoveries of Rohmer et al. [1] have established that mevalonate is a precursor of terpenoids such as sterols and rubber, biosynthesized in the cytosol of plants, while pyruvate and glyceraldehyde phosphate are the precursors of terpenoids synthesized within chloroplasts. Both pathways produce isopentenyl diphosphate (IPP) as the building block of terpenoids, and some of it can enter chloroplasts and become incorporated into isoprenoids. Mevalonate is incorporated into isoprenoids in very low yields by intact isolated chloroplasts [2], but pyruvate and IPP are incorporated at a considerably higher rate.
These observations led us to re-examine some of the results reported earlier on the incorporation of stereospecifically tritiated mevalonates into a range of carotenoids. When the experiments were repeated, we failed to obtain incorporation of mevalonate into the compounds sought, and therefore we deduce that the original claims are not supported. We therefore withdraw our earlier conclusions about the biosynthesis of lutein, peridinin, diadinoxanthin, neoxanthin and bacterioruberin [3–7].
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