genetically modified (gm) foods hold the key to ending hunger and malnutrition in africa.   due to the increasing number of gmos cultivation and delay in the approval of biosafety law in nigeria, it has become necessary to screen maize products in order to determine the identity of the consumed daily foodstuffs. in this study, dna extraction from raw and processed maize foods sold commercially ...

Controlling gene expression during plant development is an efficient tool to explore gene function. In this paper, we describe a gene expression system driven by a heat-shock gene promoter (HSP18.2), to trigger the expression of an intron-containing inverted-repeat. RNA interference became a powerful way for gene functional analysis by reverse genetic approaches. However, constitutive gene sile...

The efficiency of maize transformation mediated by Agrobacterium tumefaciens is influenced by various factors. The aim of this study was to test the effect of different concentrations of N6 salts (50% – half strength, and 100% full strength) in the infection and cocultivation media on genetic transformation efficiency of the L3 tropical elite maize line. Immature embryos were transformed via A....

The antifungal activity of hevein-like proteins has been associated with their chitin-binding activities. Pn-AMP1 and Pn-AMP2, two hevein homologues from Pharbitis nil, show in vitro antifungal activities against both chitin and non-chitin containing fungi. Purified Pn-AMPs retained antifungal activities only under non-reducing conditions. When Pn-AMP2 cDNA was constitutively expressed in tomat...

The unfolded protein response (UPR) or the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress response occurs when folding and maturation of secretory and membrane proteins are impaired in the ER. The UPR induces a number of genes that encode ER-localized molecular chaperones and folding enzymes to increase folding capacity in the ER. We have identified Tunicamycin Induced 1 (TIN1), an Arabidopsis gene that is ...

In order to obtain a salt-tolerant perennial alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.), we transferred the halophyte Salicornia europaea L. Na(+)/H(+) antiporter gene, SeNHX1, to alfalfa by using the Agrobacterium-mediated transformation method. The transformants were confirmed by both PCR and RT-PCR analyses. Of 197 plants that were obtained after transformation, 36 were positive by PCR analysis using 2 pr...

The red fluorescent protein mCherry is widely used as a tagged in intracellular positioning and dynamic tracing due to its stable characteristics color monomer molecule. In this study, was tag explore the cell wall-directed binding of carbohydrate-binding module (CBM), order intuitively demonstrate that fusion anchored on wall. Two constitutive expression vectors harboring CBM-mCherry gene were...