Background: Newcastle disease is a major avian disease that causes enormous economic loss in poultry industry. There have been a number of reports on the suitability of plant-based recombinant vaccine against this disease. Fusion (F) and hemagglutinin-neuraminidase (HN) epitopes of the Newcastle disease virus (NDV) represent the major immunogenic sites for development of recomb...

To test the hypothesis that auxin-binding protein 1 (ABP1) is a receptor controlling auxin-mediated plant cell expansion, ABP1 complementary DNAs were expressed in a controllable fashion in tobacco plants and constitutively in maize cell lines. Induction of Arabidopsis ABP1 expression in tobacco leaf strips resulted in an increased capacity for auxin-mediated cell expansion, whereas induction o...

Ethylene response factor (ERF) proteins are important plant-specific transcription factors. Increasing evidence shows that ERF proteins regulate plant pathogen resistance, abiotic stress response and plant development through interaction with different stress responsive pathways. Previously, we revealed that overexpression of TERF1 in tobacco activates a cluster gene expression through interact...

Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) has become a model system for tissue culture and genetic engineering over the past several decades and continues to remain the 'Cinderella of Plant Biotechnology', An ill vitro culture medium (Murashige and Skoog, 1962), based on the studies with tobacco tissue cultures, has now been widely used as culture medium formulation for hundreds of plant species. Studies ...

We have previously shown that the 15-amino acid carboxyl-terminal propeptide of probarley lectin is necessary for the proper sorting of this protein to the plant vacuole. A mutant form of the protein lacking the carboxyl-terminal propeptide is secreted. To test whether the carboxyl-terminal propeptide is the vacuole sorting determinant of probarley lectin, we examined in transgenic tobacco the ...

Drought stress response is a complex trait regulated at transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels in tobacco. Since the 1990s, many studies have shown that miRNAs act in many ways to regulate target expression in plant growth, development and stress response. The recent draft genome sequence of Nicotiana benthamiana has provided a framework for Digital Gene Expression (DGE) and small RNA ...

Keratinocyte growth factor 1 (KGF1) is a growth factor that promotes epidermal cell proliferation, migration, differentiation, and wound repair. It is expressed at low levels in a form of inclusion body in E. coli. In order to increase its expression and activity, we produced tobacco plants expressing KGF1 via Agrobacterium-mediated transformation using a potato virus X (PVX)-based vector (pgR1...

Tobacco production in Kentucky has undergone numerous changes in recent years. Perhaps the most dramatic of these changes has been the introduction of float plants. Since its inception, the float system has grown rapidly in both technology and acceptance by producers. Today, tobacco float plants are produced across the state under a variety of conditions in greenhouses and outdoor float systems...

It is currently possible to transfer a biosynthetic pathway from a plant to another organism. This system has been exploited to transfer the metabolic richness of certain plant species to other plants or even to more simple metabolic organisms such as yeast or bacteria for the production of high added value plant compounds. Another application is to bioconvert substrates into scarcer or biologi...