植物学技术

An IgG-type antibody is a Y-shaped protein whose arms form two identical antigen-binding sites that are highly variable between different molecules. The stem of the Y is part of the constant region of an antibody and has very limited diversity, which can be used to detect and quantitate antibodies. T ...

Photosynthesis, as the basic process leading to biomass accumulation, is intrinsically limited by the performance of the photosynthetic apparatus under different environmental conditions. Potentially, substantial increases in crop yield and improved efficiency of prod ...

Genes encoding heterologous proteins are introduced into the plant genome for several purposes. First, the plant-made protein can be used as a tool in fundamental research. Reporter proteins can be used to characterize promoter sequences and other cis-acting sequences; the overprodu ...

The ability to introduce foreign genes into plant species by techniques such as Agrobacterium-mediated transformation or by direct gene transfer (e.g., biolistics) has opened up the possibility of using transgenic plants as host organisms for the production of heterologous protei ...

In almost all living organisms, proteolytic enzymes are involved in a variety of cellular functions not only associated with the control of specific endogenous metabolic reactions, but also with the degradation of abnormal or exogenous (“foreign”) proteins (1). Despite the fundament ...

Transient expression of genes in plant protoplasts is a powerful tool in plant molecular biology that allows quick screening and analysis of engineered proteins prior to stable transformation. Although stably transformed plant material may be preferable in many instances, transf ...

The transfer of foreign genes to plant cells is most often performed using the biological vector Agrobacterium tumefaciens (1). This Agrobacterium-mediated introduction of cloned genes into plants has been widely used for promoter characterization using reporter genes, analys ...

Monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) (1), because of their binding specificity and stability both in vivo and in vitro, are extremely useful tools in medicine, biology, and organic chemistry. The combination of hybridoma technology and recombinant DNA techniques have given access, not only to fu ...

Expression of foreign proteins in plants has become a standard technique in plant molecular biology. Various plant species have been used to produce mammalian proteins, such as human interferon (1) and serum albumin (2), as well as murine antibodies. Not only full-size antibodies (3–6) but also ...

Efficient production of transgenic plants is a prerequisite for the production of recombinant proteins in plants. In many dicotyledonous plants, Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation has been well established. High efficacy and low cost make this the method of cho ...

Chromatographic techniques are widely used for the analysis of heme and its precursors. Recent and continuing improvements in column packing materials for high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) have led to much better column efficiency and resolution. There have also been ...

Tetrapyrroles are intensely colored natural products of vital importance in the biosphere for essential processes such as respiration and photosynthesis and are also of key importance as cofactors in a number of other enzyme reactions. Tetrapyrroles may either be linear in nature, as fo ...

There are thousands of porphyrins and metalloporphyrins, and hundreds of new derivatives appear each year. This variety arises because the cyclic conjugated tetrapyrrole nucleus (Figure 1) can have different substituents at the eight β-pyrrole positions, at the four meso carbon ato ...

Phycobiliproteins are a homologous family of light-harvesting accessory proteins present in cyanobacteria (25,51), red algae (25), cryptomonads (36,52), and some species of prochlorophytes (41,48). The blue, violet, red, or yellow colors of the phycobiliproteins are due to linear te ...

Photosynthetic organisms, from bacteria to higher plants, possess light sensing molecules that enable adaptation to fluctuations in intensity, direction, duration, polarization and spectral quality of light from their environment (26). The most well known of these photorecep ...

The term bilin is a collective one to describe a broad group of open chain tetrapyrroles and derives from the name “bile pigments” as the first of these compounds to be characterized were isolated from animal bile. These bilins, biliverdin (BV) and bilirubin (BR), are the sequential products of heme de ...

The conversion of light energy into the free energy of organic compounds is the quintessence of photosynthesis. The primary process is the absorption of light by the antenna complexes and its transfer to the reaction center (RC) where photochemical energy storage take places. These are the mo ...

It is hard to believe that only some 30 years ago, it was a matter of debate whether chlorophyll (Chl) and other photosynthesis pigments are protein-bound or just dissolved in plant membranes. Philip Thornber, who vividly described this debate in his recollection of photosynthesis research in ...

Characterization of membrane proteins has always lagged behind that of soluble proteins, because most techniques of protein purification and structural study depend upon having a water-soluble preparation. The development of myriad classes of detergents over the past decades h ...

There are many techniques that can be used to purify and characterize proteins, but one especially caught my attention about 10 years ago. Is it possible to purify a protein using just water? A smart trick that does the job is aqueous 2-phase extraction. In 1958, Albertsson (2) found that when 2 aqueous solu ...