The world's first wiki where authorship really matters (Nature Genetics, 2008). Due credit and reputation for authors. Imagine a global collaborative knowledge base for original thoughts. Search thousands of articles and collaborate with scientists around the globe.
Targeting of the polyhydroxybutyrate biosynthetic pathway to the plastids of Arabidopsis thaliana results in high levels of polymer accumulation.
In the bacterium Alcaligenes eutrophus, three genes encode the enzymes necessary to catalyze the synthesis of poly[(R)-(-)-3-hydroxybutyrate] (PHB) from acetyl-CoA. In order to target these enzymes into the plastids of higher plants, the genes were modified by addition of DNA fragments encoding a pea chloroplast transit peptide, a constitutive plant promoter, and a poly(A) addition sequence. Each of the modified bacterial genes was introduced into Arabidopsis thaliana by Agrobacterium-mediated transformation, and plants containing all three genes were obtained by sexual crosses. These plants accumulated PHB up to 14% of the dry weight as 0.2- to 0.7-micron granules within plastids. In contrast to earlier experiments in which expression of the PHB biosynthetic pathway in the cytoplasm led to a deleterious effect on growth, expression of the PHB biosynthetic pathway in plastids had no obvious effect on the growth or fertility of the transgenic plants and resulted in a 100-fold increase in the amount of PHB that accumulated. We conclude that there does not appear to be any biological barrier to high-level production of PHB in higher plants. The high level of PHB accumulation also suggests that the synthesis of plastid acetyl-CoA is regulated by a mechanism which responds to metabolic demand.[1]References
- Targeting of the polyhydroxybutyrate biosynthetic pathway to the plastids of Arabidopsis thaliana results in high levels of polymer accumulation. Nawrath, C., Poirier, Y., Somerville, C. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. (1994) [Pubmed]
Annotations and hyperlinks in this abstract are from individual authors of WikiGenes or automatically generated by the WikiGenes Data Mining Engine. The abstract is from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.About WikiGenesOpen Access LicencePrivacy PolicyTerms of Use
