CoQ9 is rich in wheat, rice, oats, barley, corn, rye, and millet.
| Photo Credit: SANDEEP SAXENA
Enzymes are proteins that catalyse reactions in a cell, making metabolism efficient. For efficient functioning, many enzymes require some molecules as cofactors. These helper molecules are called coenzymes. Coenzymes are naturally occurring organic molecules that bind to and support the activity of enzymes. Coenzyme Q, also known as ubiquinone, is a molecule containing several isoprene units which are antioxidants and offer stability against stress. Ubiquinone is present in every cell membrane and crucial for energy production. It comes in 10 different types (CoQ1…Q10). Each one of them is a molecule in the respiratory chain as a water-insoluble, but lipid-soluble antioxidant. All these coenzymes play a vital role in the function of the mitochondrion, the major energy producer in the cell. In this article, we focus mainly on CoQ9 and CoQ10.
Most cereal crops produce CoQ9, which has nine isoprene units. CoQ9 is rich in wheat, rice, oats, barley, corn, rye, and millet. It is also rich in bamboo, barley, and flowering plants such as cinnamon, avocado and pepper.
Importance of CoQ10
In humans, CoQ10 is a component of the mitochondrial electron transport chain, a process that generates most of the body’s cellular energy. Organs such as the heart have high energy demands and contain high concentrations of CoQ10. CoQ9 is rich in our daily foods as it is predominant in rice, wheat and maize. But we need more CoQ10 for our health, since genetic factors, ageing, and neurological problems require additional levels of this ubiquinone.
In 2008, Montini and coworkers from Milan, Italy, showed that supplementing CoQ10 helped patients who had neurological problems; results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Similarly, in 2012, Shamima Ahmed and colleagues from the Institute of Neurology and National Hospital, London showed that infants with CoQ10 deficiency could be helped upon the addition of a ubiquinone analogue. And several dieticians and medical companies prescribe and sell drugs which are equivalent to CoQ10.
Producing CoQ10
In this connection, Kadawaki and others from the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences, Ibaraki, Japan, showed in 2006 in FEBS Letters that rice plants can be genetically engineered to produce CoQ10. Here, the authors were able to engineer the gene called ‘DdsA’ in rice plants to produce CoQ10. And in 2010, the same group introduced this gene in rice plants which have more sugar content, more CoQ10 was produced, the yield being 1.3 to 1.6 times higher. And epigenetic engineering using the Nobel-winning technique, CRISPR-Cas9, which allows the editing of precise sites in the genome, has been tried successfully by Muneaki Nakamura and others (Nature Cell Biology, 2021)
From farm to factory
‘Gene-edited plants make jump from farm to factory’ was the title given in the February 20, 2025 issue of the journal Nature in its Research Highlights selection, referring to the paper by Jing-Jing Xu and coauthors from the Centre of Excellence in Molecular Plant Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. In this paper, the authors studied hundreds of plant species, concentrating on CoQ1, the enzyme that synthesises the polyisoprenoid chain of CoQ. In rice, they genetically modified this enzyme by multiplex prime editing, a sophisticated CRISPR-based technique, to generate biofortified rice varieties that contain upto 75% CoQ10. Such a painstaking analysis has revealed how to engineer a variety of edible crops (‘farm’) in order to produce antioxidant supplements (‘factory’).
Published – April 20, 2025 12:00 am IST