Nicholas J. Price

TL;DR: It is reported that etiolated pea microsomes contain an α-xylosyltransferase that catalyzes the transfer of xylose from UDP-[14C]xylose onto β(1,4)-linked glucan chains, and it is concluded that this Arabidopsis gene encodes an β-glucan synthase activity involved in xyloglucan biosynthesis.

TL;DR: Although Arabidopsis has become the model for plant genomic and developmental research, it remains behind the rest of the field with respect to biochemical and structural analyses, and the availability of the genome sequence provides an alternative and probable first approach towards identification, by homology, of potentially interesting genes.