We review the potential for related soya species to cross-pollinate in field and greenhouse conditions. Several local soybean cultivars were fertilized successfully by pollen from wild soya. However, when the GM soybean cv. Stine 2254 RR (GTS 40-3-2) was used as a pollen 'donor' and plants of Glycine soja were the pollen 'trap', no herbicide-resistant plants were obtained during two growing seasons. Thus, natural cross-pollination between plants of the soybean species would probably be extremely rare, with a frequency below the sensitivity of this experiment. More data are needed to evaluate fully the extent of transfer of herbicide tolerance genes from widespread cultivation of soybeans to wild soya that might occur in this region.

Two lines of transgenic carrot plants producing Mycobacterium tuberculosis proteins (ESAT6 and CFP10) have been constructed. The target proteins are present in carrot storage roots at a level not less than 0.056% of the total storage protein (TSP) for ESAT6 and 0.002% of TSP for CFP10. As has been shown, oral immunization of mice induces both the cell-mediated and humoral immunities. These data suggest that the proteins in question are appropriate as a candidate edible vaccine against tuberculosis.

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BackgroundAccurate recognition of regulatory elements in promoters is an essential prerequisite for understanding the mechanisms of gene regulation at the level of transcription. Composite regulatory elements represent a particular type of such transcriptional regulatory elements consisting of pairs of individual DNA motifs. In contrast to the present approach, most available recognition techniques are based purely on statistical evaluation of the occurrence of single motifs. Such methods are limited in application, since the accuracy of recognition is greatly dependent on the size and quality of the sequence dataset. Methods that exploit available knowledge and have broad applicability are evidently needed.ResultsWe developed a novel method to identify composite regulatory elements in promoters using a library of known examples. In depth investigation of regularities encoded in known composite elements allowed us to introduce a new characteristic measure and to improve the specificity compared with other methods. Tests on an established benchmark and real genomic data show that our method outperforms other available methods based either on known examples or statistical evaluations. In addition to better recognition, a practical advantage of this method is first the ability to detect a high number of different types of composite elements, and second direct biological interpretation of the identified results. The program is available at http://gnaweb.helmholtz-hzi.de/cgi-bin/MCatch/MatrixCatch.pl and includes an option to extend the provided library by user supplied data.ConclusionsThe novel algorithm for the identification of composite regulatory elements presented in this paper was proved to be superior to existing methods. Its application to tissue specific promoters identified several highly specific composite elements with relevance to their biological function. This approach together with other methods will further advance the understanding of transcriptional regulation of genes.