Report Writing On Transgene Plants

Your company is growing plants that produce very valuable chemical X in roots. Genes responsible for the biosynthesis of this metabolite are Gene XA, GeneXB and GeneXC. These genes express only in roots because of the root-specific transcription factor, TFX, which regulates them.

These plants cannot be used for the commercial production of X because:

• Collecting the roots will kill plants, so you need to re-grow them often;
• roots are small in sizes (root's biomass is not big)

As a result, it is not easy to collect enough biomass from roots every year for the commercial production of X.

To increase the production of the chemical X your company decided to redirect the production of chemical X from roots to leaves of the same plants. The rationales behind this decision are:

• these plants have big leaves,
• to collect leaves, you do not need to kill plants and re-grow them,
• leaves and roots have the same genome, so all genes involved in the production of X exist in leaves.

You are the lucky postdoc who has to run this project. You need to designe a strategy to conduct this project. For commercial production of the generated transgenic plants under field conditions, they have to meet modern (advanced) genetic engineering conditions.

1. Design a transgene and explain its every component (you can design more than one transgene) ?

2. Design the vector that contains your transgene ?

3. Design a strategy for the generation of the transgenic plant ?

4. Design a strategy to confirm your generated plant?

5. Expression of genes X in leaves could change the expression profiles of other genes. How can you assess the global molecular changes in leaf cells?

6. Which adverse effects do you expect in your experiment ?