Forty years on: Edelman and Jefford's model of fructan metabolism

Forty years ago, a paper was published which proposed a model for the synthesis and breakdown of plant fructans (inulin)1. The work was based on activities of enzymes that had been only partially purified, the reaction products were analysed by paper chromatography, and the proposed biosynthetic reactions differed from those of other carbohydrate polymers. Little progress was made in the subsequent 30 years, and a 1993 paper from the leading UK fructan laboratory referred to the model as “flawed”. However, work over the last 10 years with the purified enzymes and their cloned genes has demonstrated beyond any doubt that the enzymes involved in fructan synthesis and breakdown operate in just the way that Edelman and Jefford described them in 19681. This original and prescient paper deserves to be more widely recognized as a classic in plant biochemistry.