植物学技术

Metabolic engineering of plant natural product pathways in heterologous systems requires the highly concerted action of several biosynthetic genes. Besides the functional heterologous expression of the genes encoding the natural product biosynthetic pathway, often addi ...

Hydroxynitrile lyase (MeHNL, EC 4.1.2.39) is a useful enzyme for production of optically active cyanohydrin compounds. Production of MeHNL can be increased by substituting rare codons of the natural sequence of cassava (Manihot esculenta) MeHNL. However, most of the MeHNL produced by this ...

Only few biological functions have been related with flavin-containing monooxygenases (FMOs) in plants, such as specific roles in auxin biosynthesis, pathogen defense, and metabolism of glucosinolates. Biochemical characterization using recombinant proteins is a promis ...

A wide variety of secondary metabolites are produced in higher plants. These metabolites are synthesized in specific organs/cells at certain developmental stages and/or under specific environmental conditions. Since these biosynthetic activities are rather restricted and ...

Benzylisoquinoline alkaloids are one of the most important groups of secondary metabolites and include the economically important analgesic morphine and the antimicrobial agent berberine. To improve the productivity of these alkaloids, we investigated the effects of putati ...

An increasing interest in carotenoids as nutritional sources of provitamin A and health-promoting compounds has prompted a significant effort in metabolic engineering of carotenoid content and composition in food crops. The strategy commonly used in plants is to increase the biosy ...

Controlled transcription of biosynthetic genes is one major mechanism regulating alkaloid production in plant cells. This regulation of biosynthetic pathways is achieved by specific transcription factors. Sequence-specific DNA-binding proteins interact with the prom ...

Regulation of gene expression is largely coordinated by a complex network of interactions between transcription factors (TFs), co-factors, and their cognate cis-regulatory elements in the genome. TFs are multidomain proteins that arise evolutionarily through protein domain s ...

The yeast one-hybrid system is widely recognized as a valuable and straightforward technique to study interactions between transcription factors and DNA. By means of one-hybrid screens, transcription factors or other DNA-binding proteins, expressed from cDNA expression libra ...

A powerful method to identify binding sites in target genes is chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP), which allows the purification of in vivo formed complexes of a DNA-binding protein and associated DNA. Briefly, the method involves the fixation of plant tissue and the isolation of the tot ...

Metabolomics is a new genomics approach that aims at measuring all or a subset of metabolites in the cell. Several approaches to plant metabolomics are currently used in plant research. These include targeted analysis, metabolite profiling, and metabolic fingerprinting. Metabolic f ...

The rich collection of known genetic information and the recent completion of rice genome sequencing project provided the cereal plant researchers a useful tool to investigate the roles of genes and genomic organization that contribute to numerous agronomic traits. Gramene (http:// ...

Next-generation sequencing has revolutionized biology by exponentially increasing sequencing output while dramatically lowering costs. High-throughput sequence data with shorter reads has opened up new applications such as whole genome resequencing, indel and SNP dete ...

microRNAs (miRNAs) are a new class of small endogenous noncoding regulatory RNAs, which play an important function in plant growth, development, phase change, and response to environmental stress. Identifying miRNAs is the first step for investigating miRNA-mediated gene regulat ...

Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR), in conjunction with reverse transcriptase, has been used for the systematic measurement of plant physiological changes in gene expression. In the present paper, we describe a qRT-PCR protocol that illustrates the essential technical steps req ...

Gene expression profiling has revolutionized functional genomics research by providing a quick handle on all the transcriptional changes that occur in the cell in response to internal or external perturbations or developmental programs. Microarrays have become the most popular ...

Agroinoculation, first developed as a simple tool to study plant–virus interactions, is a popular method of choice for functional gene analysis of viral genomes. With the explosive growth of genomic information and the development of advanced vectors to dissect plant gene function, this ...

Virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) is an efficient tool for high throughput reverse genetic screens. VIGS engages the endogenous RNA-silencing machinery of the plant host, and can yield an 85–95% reduction of target transcripts. Gene silencing is rapid, target-specific, and does not re ...

Full-length cDNAs (fl-cDNAs) are important resources for the characterization of gene function, since they contain all the information required for the production of functional RNAs and proteins. Large sets of fl-cDNA clones have been collected from several plant species and have beco ...

Activation tagging is a powerful strategy to find new gene functions, especially from genes that are redundant or show lethal knock-out phenotypes. It has been applied using T-DNA or transposons. En/Spm-I/dSpm engineered transposons are efficient Activation tags in Arabidopsis. An im ...