The transfer of C(4) plant traits into C(3) plants has long been a strategy for improving the photosynthetic performance of C(3) plants. The introduction of a pathway mimicking the C(4) photosynthetic pathway into the mesophyll cells of C(3) plants was only a realistic approach when transgenic technology was sufficiently well developed and widely adopted. Here an attempt to introduce a single-c...

Drought is a major environmental factor that limits plant growth and crop productivity. Genetic engineering is an effective approach to improve drought tolerance in various crops, including rice (Oryza sativa). Functional characterization of relevant genes is a prerequisite when identifying candidates for such improvements. We investigated OsSGL (Oryza sativa Stress tolerance and Grain Length),...

Magnaporthe oryzae is a rice blast fungus and plant pathogen that causes a serious rice disease and, therefore, poses a threat to the world's second most important food security crop. Plant transformation technology has become an adaptable system for cultivar improvement and to functionally analyze genes in plants. The objective of this study was to determine the effects (through over-expressin...

With global climate change, abnormally low temperatures have affected the world's rice production. Many genes have been shown to be essential for molecular improvement of rice cold-tolerance traits. However, less is known about the molecular cellular mechanism of their response to cold stress. Here, we investigated OsRAN2 involved in regulation of cell division during cold stress in rice. Expre...

The recent paper published in New Phytologist, Wang et al. (2014; this issue pp. 679–683), purports in its title that ‘A novel 5enolpyruvoylshikimate-3-phosphate (EPSP) synthase transgene for glyphosate resistance stimulates growth and fecundity in weedy rice (Oryza sativa) without herbicide’ and in the paper claims that weedy rice expressing the transgene is more competitively fit than the wil...

Using the scutellar tissue of rice mature embryos as a target tissue, a selectable marker gene, bar, and an unselectable gene, fatty acid desaturase gene from tobacco (NtFAD3), on separate plasmids, were introduced by particle bombardment. Co-integration, co-expression and inheritance of these genes were analyzed as well as seed fertility of the transgenic plants. Twenty-three out of 32 bialaph...

BACKGROUND Genetically modified crops (GM crops) have been developed to improve the agricultural traits of modern crop cultivars. Safety assessments of GM crops are of paramount importance in research at developmental stages and before releasing transgenic plants into the marketplace. Sequencing technology is developing rapidly, with higher output and labor efficiencies, and will eventually rep...