Plastid genetic engineering in Solanaceae

Jelli Venkatesh,Se Won Park

doi:10.1007/s00709-012-0391-9

Abstract

Plastid genetic engineering has come of age, becoming today an attractive alternative approach for the expression of foreign genes, as it offers several advantages over nuclear transformants. Significant progress has been made in plastid genetic engineering in tobacco and other Solanaceae plants, through the use of improved regeneration procedures and transformation vectors with efficient promoters and untranslated regions. Many genes encoding for industrially important proteins and vaccines, as well as genes conferring important agronomic traits, have been stably integrated and expressed in the plastid genome. Despite these advances, it remains a challenge to achieve marked levels of plastid transgene expression in non-green tissues. In this review, we summarize the basic requirements of plastid genetic engineering and discuss the current status, limitations, and the potential of plastid transformation for expanding future studies relating to Solanaceae plants.

Highlights

The family Solanaceae consists of a number of economically important plants, including several major food crops, such as tomato, potato, eggplant, and pepper; ornamental crops, such as petunia; and medicinal crops, such as Handling Editor: Peter NickJ
Considerable progress has been made in understanding the plastid transgene expression and in unraveling the potential of the technology for future biotechnological applications (Bock 2007; Verma et al 2008; Bock and Warzecha 2010; Maliga and Bock 2011)
A greater extent of foreign protein accumulation was achieved in transplastomic tobacco plants

Summary

Introduction

The family Solanaceae consists of a number of economically important plants, including several major food crops, such as tomato, potato, eggplant, and pepper; ornamental crops, such as petunia; and medicinal crops, such as Handling Editor: Peter Nick. The third approach is the excision of marker genes with the use of site-specific phage recombination systems, Cre/LoxP or phiC31/attB/attP (Lutz et al 2007) This system requires additional steps of integration and removal of plastid-targeted phage recombinases from transplastomic plants. Features that have been the target of plastid genetic engineering of Solanaceae crop plants include increased photosynthetic efficiency, biofortification, abiotic stress tolerance, herbicide resistance, pest and disease resistance, and the use of plants as factories for producing biopolymers and biopharmaceuticals. Transplastomic tobacco plants expressing the bacterial bar gene linked with spectinomycin resistance (aadA) gene for selection of transformants showed a significantly elevated expression level of phosphinothricin acetyltransferase and exhibited field-level tolerance to Liberty, an herbicide containing PPT (Lutz et al 2001). These results clearly indicate that plastid transformation is an effective plant-based production platform for nextgeneration vaccines

Limitations

Findings

Conclusion