https://phys.org/news/2018-07-summer-fun.html

"We hypothesized that breaking down of chloroplastic lipids would be controlled by some unidentified genes that encode lipases localized in chloroplasts and which are induced by heat stress," explains first author Yasuhiro Higashi. "We used several public omics databases to isolate candidate genes involved in heat-stress responses, predict where the genes are expressed in the plants, and to find gene homologues in several plants species."

Lipases are proteins that break apart lipids. A transcriptome analysis identified candidate lipase genes, and proteomics databases were able to narrow down the search by predicting which genes were localized in chloroplasts. To test the most likely candidate gene—which they subsequently named Heat Inducible Lipase 1 (HIL1)—they created a hil1 mutant Arabidopsis plant in which the gene was disrupted, and compared mutant responses to heat stress with those of normal plants.