Abstract
The Asteraceae family is the largest and most diversified family of the Angiosperms, characterized by the presence of numerous clustered inflorescences, which have the appearance of a single compound flower. It is estimated that this family represents around 10% of all flowered species, with a great biodiversity, covering all environments on the planet, except Antarctica. Also, it includes economically important crops, such as lettuce, sunflower, and chrysanthemum; wild flowers; herbs, and several species that produce molecules with pharmacological properties. Nevertheless, the biotechnological improvement of this family is limited to a few species and their genetic transformation was achieved later than in other plant families. Lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.) is a model species in molecular biology and plant biotechnology that has easily adapted to tissue culture, with efficient shoot regeneration from different tissues, organs, cells, and protoplasts. Due to this plasticity, it was possible to obtain transgenic plants tolerant to biotic or abiotic stresses as well as for the production of commercially interesting molecules (molecular farming). These advances, together with the complete sequencing of lettuce genome allowed the rapid adoption of gene editing using the CRISPR system. On the other hand, sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) is a species that for years was considered recalcitrant to in vitro culture. Although this difficulty was overcome and some publications were made on sunflower genetic transformation, until now there is no transgenic variety commercialized or authorized for cultivation. In this article, we review similarities (such as avoiding the utilization of the CaMV35S promoter in transformation vectors) and differences (such as transformation efficiency) in the state of the art of genetic transformation techniques performed in these two species.
Highlights
Asteraceae is the largest and most diversified Angiosperm family (Funk et al, 2005)
In addition to its responsiveness to tissue culture and genetic transformation, lettuce has characteristics that makes it a model species: it has a short life cycle, which allows a rapid recovery of complete plants, molecules of interest, and transgenic progeny, it is an autogamous plant with a completely sequenced diploid genome (Reyes-Chin-Wo et al, 2017), which facilitates the obtaining of homozygous transgenic lines, and it can be cultured and grown at chamber, in hydroponics, in the greenhouse or in the field, allowing an easy scaling-up or -down of its production
Different publications on sunflower and lettuce genetic transformation were reviewed in this work, and it is concluded that these Asteraceae species have certain specific characteristics of their own
Summary
Asteraceae is the largest and most diversified Angiosperm family (Funk et al, 2005). With more than 24,000 described species, it is estimated that this family represents about 10% of all flowering species. The study and application of biotechnological techniques related to in vitro culture and transformation in species of the Asteraceae family have been developed mainly in chrysanthemum, lettuce, and sunflower.
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