T-DNA Tagging: A Promising Tool for Functional Genomics in Medicinal Plants

Copyright: © 2012 Ma Y, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Nowadays, herbal medicines have been widely used in health care and disease treatment and the share of herbal medicinal products in pharmaceutical market is increasing rapidly in many countries. One of the main resources of active pharmaceutical ingredients of herbal medicines is secondary metabolites, many of which are structurally complex and difficult to synthesize chemically. Thus, increasing the yield of some secondary metabolites through bioengineering approaches is highly desired. However, it is difficult to achieve at present because the genetic background of most medicinal plants is not clear and the genes involved in the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites are largely unknown. Intensive studies on functional genomics in medicinal plants seem to be a key for solving this problem.