Plant genetics: Transformation of cereal crops by direct gene transfer

Genetic transformation of major cereal crops.

Of the more than 50,000 edible plant species in the world, at least 10,000 species are cereal grains. Three major cereal crops, rice (Oryza sativa), maize (Zea mays), and wheat (Triticum sp.), provide two-thirds of the world's food energy intake. Although crop yields have improved tremendously thanks to technological advances in the past 50 years, population increases and climate changes contin...

Relationships of cereal crops and other grasses.

The grass family includes some 10,000 species, and it encompasses tremendous morphological, physiological, ecological, and genetic diversity. The phylogeny of the family is becoming increasingly well understood. There were two major radiations of grasses, an early diversification leading to the subfamilies Pooideae, Bambusoideae, and Oryzoideae, and a later one leading to Panicoideae, Chloridoi...

Direct links between the vernalization response and other key traits of cereal crops.

Transcription of the vernalization1 gene (VRN1) is induced by prolonged cold (vernalization) to trigger flowering of cereal crops, such as wheat and barley. VRN1 encodes a MADS box transcription factor that promotes flowering by regulating the expression of other genes. Here we use transcriptome sequencing (RNA-seq) and chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing (ChIP-seq) to identify direct targ...

Cereal Crops : Rice , Maize , Millet , Sorghum , Wheat

Plant Resistance Genes for Fungal Pathogens - Physiological Models and Identification in Cereal Crops

The complex biological phenomenon “resistance” can be reduced to single Mendelian traits acting on both the plant and the pathogen side in a number o f pathosystems. According to the “gene-for-gene hypothesis”, the outcome o f a plant/pathogen interaction in these cases is in­ compatibility if a plant carrying a particular resistance gene and a pathogen with the comple­ mentary avirulence gene ...