Kevin E. Mcbride

Manipulation of storage compounds in transgenic plants

Publisher Summary All plants capture CO 2 as photosynthate. They use this captured carbon for metabolic and structural purposes, and also store it for future use. The three major storage forms of carbon that the plant utilizes are carbohydrates, lipids and proteins. These compounds have wide utility for man, both as food and for industrial uses. Genetic engineering of plants offers the ability to be able to modify these compounds for greater nutrition or altered industrial properties, or to induce the plant to make more and thus, increase yield. The possibilities for doing this with protein, particularly with a goal of improving nutritional quality by altering amino acid balance, are being realized. This chapter describes how recent innovations in plastid transformation provide even greater opportunities for modifying these plant storage components. It is found that a plastid-encoded monocistronic mRNA can be synthesized by T7 RNAP, and that this message is fully capable of being translated in plastids of different tissues within the developing plants. Plants can now be designed to express T7 RNAP in a tissue- or induction-specific manner, limited expression of the plastid transgene appropriately. This may allow modification of plastid metabolism in selected plastid/tissue types without altering normal plant growth and development.