Plastid transformation is routine in tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) but 100-fold less frequent in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana), preventing its use in plastid biology. A recent study revealed that null mutations in ACC2, encoding a plastid-targeted acetylcoenzyme A carboxylase, cause hypersensitivity to spectinomycin. We hypothesized that plastid transformation efficiency should increase in t...

Plastid transformation for the expression of recombinant proteins and entire metabolic pathways has become a promising tool for plant biotechnology. However, large-scale application of this technology has been hindered by some technical bottlenecks, including lack of routine transformation protocols for agronomically important crop plants like rice or maize. Currently, there are no standard or ...

Presence of antibiotic resistance markers has always been considered as one of the main safety concerns in transgenic plants and their derived products. Elimination of antibiotic selectable markers from transgenics is a major hurdle for finding efficient and safe candidates. Herbicide tolerance genes might be attractive alternatives. In this study, a variant form of the 5-enoylpyruvyl shikimate...

Genetic material in plants is distributed into nucleus, plastids and mitochondria. Plastid has a central role of carrying out photosynthesis in plant cells. Plastid transformation is becoming more popular and an alternative to nuclear gene transformation because of various advantages like high protein levels, the feasibility of expressing multiple proteins from polycistronic mRNAs, and gene con...

Most plastid transformation studies with tobacco, and all reports for other species (except tomato [G.D. Nugent, M. ten Have, A. van der Gulik, P.J. Dix, B.A. Uijtewaal, A.P. Mordhorst, Plastid transformants of tomato selected using mutations affecting ribosome structure. Plant Cell Rep. 24 (2005) 341–349]), have used biolistics for plastid transformation. However, nuclear transformation via bi...

presence of antibiotic resistance markers has always been considered as one of the main safety concerns in transgenic plants and their derived products. elimination of antibiotic selectable markers from transgenics is a major hurdle for finding efficient and safe candidates. herbicide tolerance genes might be attractive alternatives. in this study, a variant form of the 5-enoylpyruvyl shikimate...

Although leaf chloroplast transformation technology was developed more than a decade ago, no reports exist of stable transformation of undeveloped plastids or other specialized plastid types, such as proplastids, etioplasts, or amyloplasts. In this work we report development of a dark-grown tobacco suspension cell model system to investigate the transformation potential of undeveloped plastids....

Although leaf chloroplast transformation technology was developed more than a decade ago, no reports exist of stable transformation of undeveloped plastids or other specialized plastid types, such as proplastids, etioplasts, or amyloplasts. In this work we report development of a dark-grown tobacco suspension cell model system to investigate the transformation potential of undeveloped plastids....

The use of a nonlethal selection scheme, most often using the aadA gene that confers resistance to spectinomycin and streptomycin, has been considered critical for recovery of plastid transformation events. In this study, the plastid-lethal markers, glyphosate or phosphinothricin herbicides, were used to develop a selection scheme for plastids that circumvents the need for integration of an ant...

The small bacterial-type genome of the plastid (chloroplast) can be engineered by genetic transformation, generating cells and plants with transgenic plastid genomes, also referred to as transplastomic plants. The transformation process relies on homologous recombination, thereby facilitating the site-specific alteration of endogenous plastid genes as well as the precisely targeted insertion of...