Genetic manipulation, of crop plants

Zhang et al., 1997). In turn, this offers the opportunity of genetic manipulation of crop plants with a view to improvingphotosyntheticperformance. 

Under natural conditions. Agrobacterium does not appear to infect monocotyledonous plants. Genetic manipulation of cereal crops using a Ti-plasmid delivered by Agrobacterium therefore seems out of the question. However, there are some data to suggest that Agrobacterium can, under certain circumstances, infect monocots, but that it does not cause... 

The first reports of genetic manipulation of a crop plant were using the carrot. The introduction of crt genes from Erwinia herbicola by a group from Amoco (Ausich etal, 1991 Hauptmann etal.,1991) resulted in elevated levels of P-carotene. 

Chemical manipulation of secondary compound composition of crop plants offers several advantages over genetic control of their production. Chemical manipulation allows for timing the manipulation as well as possibly determining the quality and quantity of the desired response. 

In recent years it has become apparent that dicotyledonous plant species contain two distinctive forms of the enzyme acetyl CoA carboxylase, type I a single polypeptide of >220 kDa, and, type II a complex of smaller proteins BC, BCCP and CTa and p. To fully achieve the potential for the genetic manipulation of lipid products from crops a detailed understanding of fatty acid synthesis is required. This is dependent upon a full characterisation of the proteins involved, and more specifically on the pivotal enzyme ACCase. 

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