NEW PROCEDURE TO OBTAIN VEGETABLES WITH A HIGH NUTRITIONAL LEVEL

Plant foods are considered healthy and can help prevent disease, but they lack sufficient protein content to maintain a balanced diet in humans. Crop plants and especially cereals are poor in protein. This low protein content is aggravated by climate change, as it has been observed that an increase in CO2 concentration increases the starch content to the detriment of the protein content of vegetables. Obtaining products of plant origin with improved nutritional characteristics and especially plants with higher protein content is a priority objective of the European Union both for reasons of sustainable development and for the benefits it can bring to health, since excessive consumption of products of animal origin, especially red meat and processed meats, can have negative effects on health. The genetically modified plants that have been developed to date have not achieved sufficiently satisfactory results. Researchers from the Universitat de València have developed a new procedure to obtain vegetables with high nutritional level by activating a serine biosynthesis pathway (phosphorylating pathway) that is crucial in the control of carbon, nitrogen and sulfur fluxes. Through genetic engineering, the researchers have overexpressed genes encoding enzymes of the phosphorylating pathway of plant serine biosynthesis in the model organism Arabidopsis and in maize. The results obtained by the inventors demonstrate that the present invention directs plant metabolism towards a higher content of some essential amino acids and in turn increases the overall production of proteins and carbohydrates, and not only to a higher production of a specific protein or amino acid.