Fast and accurate detection of plant species and their hybrids using molecular tools will facilitate the assessment and monitoring of local biodiversity in an era of climate and environmental change. Herein, we evaluate the utility of the plastid trnL marker for species identification applied to Mediterranean pines (Pinus spp.). Our results indicate that trnL is a very sensitive marker for deli...

The ability to manipulate plant fatty acid biosynthesis by using new biotechnological approaches has allowed the production of transgenic plants with unusual fatty acid profile and increased oil content. This review focuses on the production of very long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (VLCPUFAs) and the increase in oil content in plants using molecular biology tools. Evidences suggest that r...

Dual-conditional positive/negative selection markers are versatile genetic tools for manipulating genomes. Plastid genomes are relatively small and conserved DNA molecules that can be manipulated precisely by homologous recombination. High-yield expression of recombinant products and maternal inheritance of plastid-encoded traits make plastids attractive sites for modification. Here, we describ...

Abstract Dorema (Apiaceae) includes 12 species distributed in the Irano-Turanian region. The genus differs from other genera of subfamily Apioideae having paniculate inflorescences with simple umbels. Recently, molecular phylogenetic analyses placed six Dorema, including generitype, Ferula , thus subsuming former into synonymy latter. remaining congeners have not been yet included analyses. Her...

D-serine is toxic to plants. D-serine ammonia lyase, which is encoded by the dsdA gene, can attenuate this toxicity with high specificity. In the present study, we explored the function of codon-optimized dsdA with tobacco plastids and rice nuclear transformation system. It was shown that dsdA gene was site-specifically integrated into the tobacco plastid genome and displayed a high level of ex...

The chloroplast is a pivotal organelle in plant cells and eukaryotic algae to carry out photosynthesis, which provides the primary source of the world's food. The expression of foreign genes in chloroplasts offers several advantages over their expression in the nucleus: high-level expression, transgene stacking in operons and a lack of epigenetic interference allowing stable transgene expressio...

Although plastid DNA has been widely explored as a marker of choice for phylogeny and phylogeography studies, little is known about its utility for examining relationships between closely related species. The slow evolutionary rates inherent to chloroplast (cp) DNA make it difficult to perform lower level taxonomic analyses, particularly at the population level. We characterized the nucleotide ...

Tissue grafting includes applications ranging from plant breeding to animal organ transplantation. Donor and recipient are generally believed to maintain their genetic integrity, in that the grafted tissues are joined but their genetic materials do not mix. We grafted tobacco plants from two transgenic lines carrying different marker and reporter genes in different cellular compartments, the nu...

In situ hybridization coupled with electron microscopy has been used to locate mRNAs for the small and large subunits of ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate carboxlase in young leaf tissue of tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) plants. The endogeneous mRNAs were hybridized with either a biotinylated DNA probe for the small subunit or large subunit and subsequently visualized using avidin-ferritin conjugates a...

Tobacco chloroplasts are ready to be tested as a platform for the expression of recombinant proteins on a commercial scale. They hold the promise of reproducible yields of 5-25% of total soluble cellular protein in leaves and reliability has been achieved through refinement of an expression toolkit that includes vectors, recently developed expression cassettes and systems for marker gene remova...