Plastid transformation offers a viable alternative to nuclear transformation because of its numerous advantages. It was against this backdrop that various groups of researchers have been exploiting this group of sub-cellular organelles, over the last two decades, for the genetic engineering of agronomic traits and metabolic pathways, as well as for molecular farming for the production of plant-...

5 2 Summary Plastid transformation is a well-established tool for biotechnology as it allows high expression levels of proteins and as it provides biological transgene containment because of maternal inheritance of cytoplasmic genes in most crops. In basic research the function and regulation of plastid encoded genes can be further studied with the help of plastid transformation. This study is ...

Plastids are the organelles of plants and algae that house photosynthesis and many other biochemical pathways. Plastids contain a small genome, but most of their proteins are encoded in the nucleus and posttranslationally targeted to the organelle. When plants and algae lose photosynthesis, they virtually always retain a highly reduced "cryptic" plastid. Cryptic plastids are known to exist in m...

We report here a 100-fold increased frequency of plastid transformation in tobacco by selection for a chimeric aadA gene encoding aminoglycoside 3"-adenylyltransferase, as compared with that obtained with mutant 16S rRNA genes. Expression of aadA confers resistance to spectinomycin and streptomycin. In transforming plasmid pZS197, a chimeric aadA is cloned between rbcL and open reading frame OR...

erated by introducing foreign genes into the nuclear genome. Here we focus on plastid transformation as an alternative. Plastids have their own rudimentary genome, the plastome, which encodes around 120 genes [1]. Plastids in green tissues are “chloroplasts”, whose primary function is photosynthesis. In contrast to the nuclear genome with typically two copies of each gene per cell, the plastome...