Plant Plastid Engineering

Wani, Shabir H.; Haider, Nadia; Kumar, Hitesh; Singh, N.B.

Since plastids are inherited maternally in the majority of angiosperm species, they would therefore not be found in pollen grains of corps. Insertion of transgenes, therefore, into the plastid genome has the potential of preventing gene flow via pollen. Hence, genes expressed in the plastome will not be transferred through pollination to weedy or wild relatives of the transgenic crop. Bansal and Sharma, [62] believes that there is little risk of any transgene flow via pollen from transplastomic plants to the neighboring weedy or wild relatives since plastids are almost always maternally transferred to the next progeny. The authors suggested that plastid transformation could be a method of choice for generating improved transgenics in crops that grow along with their weedy or wild relatives in the same geographical region, such as rice, sorghum, cucurbits, solanaceous crops, Vigna and Cajanus species, and various Brassica crops. Therefore, the focus of many researchers has shifted to plastid engineering [26] , rather than nuclear transformation. Singh et al. 2010 [26] reported that engineering of the plastid genome is gaining momentum as an attractive alternative to nuclear transformation.