Manipulating Gene Expression for the Metabolic Engineering of Plants

Abstract

Introducing and expressing foreign genes in plants present many technical challenges that are not encountered with microbial systems. This review addresses the variety of issues that must be considered and the variety of options that are available, in terms of choosing transformation systems and designing recombinant transgenes to ensure appropriate expression in plant cells. Tissue specificity and proper developmental regulation, as well as proper subcellular localization of products, must be dealt with for successful metabolic engineering in plants..

Agrobacterium rhizogenes-Mediated Transformation and Its Biotechnological Applications in Crops

“…On the other hand, Agrobacterium-based plant transformation is very effective method of creating plants at low cost, simple to use and with low copy number inserted. Limited number of host range is the only disadvantage (Lessard et al 2002;Chandra 2012). For achieving transformation of plants, Agrobacterium based technology has been used since the mid-1990s increasingly (Hiei et al 1994).…”

Metabolic Engineering of Medicinal Plants and Microorganisms for the Production of Natural Products

“…The constraint is the subsequent regeneration of transgenic plants, which remains problematic and time consuming. Unwanted somaclonal variation may be introduced through the tissue culture regeneration system in some cases [51] .…”

“…Metabolic engineering of plants offers interesting perspectives to improve the productivity of the plant as a cell factory. This approach may create new opportunities in agriculture, environmental applications, production of chemicals, and medicines [22,51] . The main goal of metabolic engineering in general is to produce the desired natural products in a sustainable and economically attractive way [24] .…”

Transgenic Plants as Biofactories for the Production of Biopharmaceuticals: A Case Study of Human Placental Lactogen

“…Codon usage between divergent species is often very different and will affect the expression level of recombinant proteins (Lessard et al, 2002). Based on available data of codon usage for a given host plant, transgene codons with the lowest usage frequency are modified by changing the nucleotide sequence without changing the amino acid sequence (Desai et al, 2010).…”