“…Biochemical analyses of the three AtHOL proteins showed that they have SAMdependent methyltransferase activities toward iodide ions as well as chloride, thiocyanate, and hydrosul de ions (Nagatoshi and Nakamura 2009). Plant proteins in which amino acid sequences showed high similarities to Arabidopsis HOL were classi ed as HOL family proteins, including independently characterized methyl chloride transferase (MCT) Hager 1998, 1999), thiol methyltransferase (TMT) (Attieh et al , 2000(Attieh et al , 2002, and halide/thiol methyltransferase (HTMT) (Itoh et al 2009). MCT, TMT, and HTMT proteins are also shown to possess SAM-dependent methyltransferase activity toward not only iodide ions, but also toward ions such as chloride, bromide, thiocyanate, and hydrosul de (Ni and Short Communication DOI: 10.5511/plantbiotechnology.12.0207a Abbreviations: GC-MS, Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry; HPLC, High performance liquid chromatography; MALDI-TOF-MS, Matrixassisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-ight mass spectrometry; SAH, S-Adenosyl-L-homocysteine; SAM, S-Adenosyl-L-methionine; SDS-PAGE, Sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis.…”