TRANSGENIC PLANTS AS BIOREACTORS (MOLECULAR FARMING)

Plants can be used as tightfisted compound factories to facilitate require individual wet, reserves, sun light and carbon dioxide to deliver thousands of sophisticated compound molecules with atypical structures. By transferring the reasonable genes, plants can perform as bioreactors to modified or spanking compounds such as amino acids, proteins, vitamins, plastics, pharmaceuticals (peptides and proteins), drugs, enzymes in lieu of food industry and so on. The transgenic plants as bioreactors bear about advantages such as the cost of production is low, at hand is an limitless supply, safe and environmental friendly and at hand is rejection scare of open out of subconscious borne diseases.

Tobacco is the largely preferred conceal as a transgenic bioreactor since it can be by far transformed and engineered. Tobacco is an tremendous biomass producer with on the order of 40 tons of fresh leaf production as in contradiction of e.G. Rice with 4 tons. The seed production is very excessive (approx. Individual million seeds for every plant) and it can be harvested several period in a day.

Some of the uses of transgenic plants are:

Improvement of Nutrient quality

Transgenic crops with improved nutritional quality bear already been produced by introducing genes involved in the metabolism of vitamins, reserves and amino acids.

A transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana to facilitate can deliver ten-fold elevated vitamin E (alpha-tocopherol) than the native conceal has been urbanized. The biochemical machinery to deliver a compound close in composition to alpha-tocopherol is contemporary in A. Thaliana. A gene to facilitate can in the end deliver alpha-tocopherol is moreover contemporary, but is not articulated. This hidden gene was activated by inserting a regulatory gene from a bacterium which resulted in an efficient production of vitamin E.

Glycinin is a lysine-rich protein of soybean and the gene encoding glycinin has been introduced into rice and successfully articulated. The transgenic rice plants produced glycinin with excessive contents of lysine.

Using genetic engineering Prof Potrykus and Dr. Peter Beyer bear urbanized rice which is enriched in pro-vitamin A by introducing three genes involved in the biosynthetic pathway in lieu of carotenoid, the precursor in lieu of vitamin A. The wish was to help millions of inhabit who suffer from night sightlessness due to Vitamin A deficiency, especially whose fastener diet is rice. The presence of beta-carotene in the rice gives a characteristic yellow/orange colour, and so this pro-vitamin A enriched rice is named as Golden Rice.

The genetic engineering is moreover being used to recover the taste of food e.G. A protein ‘monellin’ isolated from an African conceal (Dioscorephyllum cumminsii) is on the order of 100,000 sweeter than sucrose on molar basis. Monellin gene has been introduced into tomato and lettuce plants to recover their taste.

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