Here we report the characterization of the Chlamydomonas reinhardtii gene ARG9, encoding the plastid resident N-acetyl ornithine aminotransferase, which is involved in arginine synthesis. Integration of an engineered ARG9 cassette in the plastid chromosome of the nuclear arg9 mutant restores arginine prototrophy. This suggests that ARG9 could be used as a new selectable marker for plastid trans...

This study established a new system for potato transformation using toxoflavin as selection agent and toxoflavin lyase (tflA) as selectable marker gene. Potato plants expressing tflA was successfully transformed on toxoflavin medium with 27% efficiency, similar to that for the hygromycin/hpt selection system. The transgenic potato expressing tflA also showed resistance to Burkholderia glumea in...

Streptomyces bacteria are known for producing important natural compounds by secondary metabolism, especially antibiotics with novel biological activities. Functional studies of antibiotic-biosynthesizing gene clusters are generally through homologous genomic recombination by gene-targeting vectors. Here, we present a rapid and efficient method for construction of gene-targeting vectors. This a...

Bananas and plantains are an important source of food and income for millions of persons in the world. Their production is constrained by many biotic and abiotic stress factors but their improvement through traditional plant breeding methods is very difficult because they do not produce seeds, are polyploid and have a long generation time. Biotechnological approaches like genetic transformation...

Thyroglobulin gene expression was repressed in a rat thyroid cell line transformed with Kirsten murine sarcoma virus. Expression of a dominant selectable marker driven by the thyroglobulin promoter was also inhibited. Somatic cell hybridization of transformed and differentiated thyroid cells resulted in extinction of thyroglobulin gene expression. When transformed cells carrying a dominant sele...

background: trastuzumab (herceptin) is a humanized monoclonal antibody (mab) which is used for specific treatment of metastatic breast cancer in patients with overexpression of her2/neu receptor. in this study, we have attempted to develop a biosimilar version of trastuzumab mab. methods: according to in silico studies, the heavy and light chains of trastuzumab mab were designed and constructed...

Drosophila melanogaster remains an excellent model system for understanding complex biological processes. This is in large part due to the many tools that can be applied experimentally. The control of transgene expression in Drosophila has been an extremely successful technique for assessing genetic function. P-element mediated germ-line transformation is routinely used to generate novel Drosop...

Selectable marker genes (SMGs) have been extraordinarily useful in enabling plant transformation because of the low efficiency of transgene integration. The most used SMGs encode proteins resistant to antibiotics or herbicides and use negative selection, i.e., by killing nontransgenic tissue. However, there are perceived risks in wide-scale deployment of SMG-transgenic plants, and therefore res...