Classical biotechnology is the science of production of human-useful processes and products under controlled conditions, applying biological agents – microorganisms, plant or animal cells, their exoand endoproducts, e.g. enzymes, etc. (Viesturs et al., 2004). The conventional agriculture or chemistry cannot perform these processes as efficiently or at all. In fact, conventional biotechnology ha...

EARLY FLOWERING 3 (ELF3) plays key roles in the control of circadian rhythms, photoperiodic flowering, hypocotyls length and response to light in Arabidopsis. ELF3, however, encodes a protein without any motifs or domains of known function. Biochemical function of ELF3 has been largely unknown. Here we show the first demonstration of diversity of numbers of polyglutamines in the ELF3 among 60 A...

Tobacco plants were transformed with a Nhap type Na /H antiporter gene, SynnhaP1 (slr1595), from a cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803. Two kinds of promoters, Arabidopsis alcohol dehydrogenase gene promoter (Adh promoter) and CaMV 35S promoter (35S promoter), were used. The transgenic plants driven by Adh promoter accumulated SynNhaP1 proteins only in root whereas the transgenic plants d...

Plants are the sources of major food, feed, and fiber products that are used globally. This past year has seen advances in our understanding of the enzymes that modify wall architecture, the cloning of the first cellulose synthase gene, and revisions to the lignin biosynthetic pathway. These discoveries have facilitated the development of new strategies to alter cell wall properties in transgen...

Specifically accessible chromatin sites, detected as DNase I hypersensitive sites (DNase I HSs), have been found at promoters of most genes in yeast, human as well as in Arabidopsis chromatin. The DNase I HSs are constitutively present at promoters of most genes both at inactive and activated states. On the other hand, appearance and disappearance of DNase I HSs have been observed at several de...

The soil nourishing the crops that provide our food and fiber is a complex environment where microbes live in numbers estimated to reach 2 billion per ounce of soil. Millions upon millions of individual bacteria and fungi Uve on root surfaces and the soil particles that surround them. Bacteria are the smallest and the most abundant. The fungi, usually larger than bacteria, are found throughout ...

As a member of the Solanaceae Genomics Network International Tomato Sequencing Project, we launched on sequencing of the chromosome 8. Our task is to sequence the euchromatin region of the chromosome, the estimated size of which is 17 megabases. BAC-by-BAC strategy is adopted for sequencing. We initially received BAC clone candidates anchored to overgo probes developed from 33 markers mapped on...

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is a model plant of the Solanaceae family. Various biological aspects of tomato have been investigated with molecular biological approaches, and a significant amount of DNA and protein sequencing data on tomato has been accumulated. Recently, the number of tomato genome sequences in the International Nucleotide Sequence Databases has been rapidly increasing due to ...

The oligosaccharide structures of total glycoproteins in suspension-cultured Arabidopsis thaliana MM2d cells are determined. The N-linked sugar chains released by hydrazinolysis were labeled with 2-aminopyridine, and analyzed by a combination of HPLC, matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry, and exoglucosidase digestion. The glycan structures determined were...

Biotechnology requires robust and predictable expression of transgenes. Most commercial Genetically Modified (GM) crops contain the viral 35S promoter to drive insecticide and herbicide resistance genes. In cotton there have been reductions in efficacy of Bacillus thuringiensis toxin (Bt) expressing plants late in the season that have been attributed to reductions in promoter activity. We have ...