Chapter 30 - Developments in transgenic biology and the genetic engineering of useful traits

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the development of transgenic biology and the genetic engineering of useful traits. There has also been considerable public concern over GM technology in general, and to allay many of the perceived problems, substantial scientific advances have been made in such areas as developing “clean-gene” technology, studies on resistance breakdown, large-scale studies of gene flow in the environment and the actual composition and safety of introduced traits. The changing emphasis in target traits has been a key feature in the development of transgenic technology in potato, which has been at the forefront of progress in crop plants due to the relative ease of transformation of this species. The more complex traits have been facilitated by the development of increasingly efficient and sophisticated approaches, including the vastly increased knowledge of genomes and gene function. Furthermore, such output traits are considered to be more acceptable to consumers and have thus been the focus of commercially funded as well as academic projects. The potato has been a model crop for transformation, due to the relative ease of A. tumefaciens-mediated transformation, but developments in areas such as VIGS may lead to hitherto unconsidered possibilities for testing genes and host: pathogen interactions.