Plant Genome II Conference
Town & Country Conference Center, San Diego, CA, January, 1994.
PG-II: RICE TRANSFORMATION: TOOLS FOR STUDIES IN GENE REGULATION AND
CROP IMPROVEMENT
RICE TRANSFORMATION: TOOLS FOR STUDIES IN GENE REGULATION AND
CROP IMPROVEMENT.
Ko Shimamoto. Plantech Research Institute, 1000 Kamoshida,
Midori-ku, Yokohama 227 Japan
Rice is the first cereal in which routine transformation was
developed and two methods, protoplast transformation and particle
bombardment, are routinely used for transformation at present.
Activities of a number of cereal promoters which are tissue
specific and inducible have been analyzed in transgenic rice
using promoter-gusA fusion genes. The results indicate that
promoters derived from not only rice but also from maize, wheat
and barley confer highly regulated expression of the reporter
gene in rice. Furthermore, functional cis-elements present in
promoter regions of maize Adh1 and wheat histone H3 gene have
been identified by using transgenic rice.
Economically important genes have been also introduced into
rice. The first example is the coat protein gene of rice stripe
virus. Transgenic rice expressing the coat protein exhibited
resistance to the virus, suggesting that the coat protein
mediated resistance to viruses can be applied with cereals. More
recently rice plants resistant to lepidopteran pests were
produced by introduction of a modified endotoxin gene of Bacillus
thuringiensis. Antisense inhibition of waxy gene expression was
also demonstrated in rice indicating the possibility of
manipulating starch quality of rice grains. These studies
indicate that transgenic rice is a useful model for studies in
monocot gene regulation and application of molecular biology for
cereal improvement.
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