Tài liệu Plant Biotechnology - Current and Future Applications of Genetically Modified Crops - NIGEL G. HALFO

Plant Biotechnology
Current and Future Applications of Genetically Modified Crops (307 pages)


Edited by
NIGEL G. HALFORD
Crop Performance and Improvement, Rothamsted Research, UK

Contents
List of Contributors page vii
Preface xi
PART I THE CURRENT SITUATION 1
1.1 From Primitive Selection to Genetic Modification,
Ten Thousand Years of Plant Breeding 3
Nigel G. Halford
1.2 Crop Biotechnology in the United States: Experiences and Impacts 28
Sujatha Sankula
1.3 Development of Biotech Crops in China 53
Qingzhong Xue, Yuhua Zhang and Xianyin Zhang
PART II NEW DEVELOPMENTS 69
2.1 Advances in Transformation Technologies 71
Huw D. Jones
2.2 Enhanced Nutritional Value of Food Crops 91
Dietrich Rein and Karin Herbers
2.3 The Production of Long-Chain Polyunsaturated Fatty
Acids in Transgenic Plants 118
Louise V. Michaelson, Fre´de´ric Beaudoin, Olga Sayanova
and Johnathan A. Napier
2.4 The Application of Genetic Engineering to the Improvement
of Cereal Grain Quality 133
Peter R. Shewry
2.5 Improvements in Starch Quality 151
Michael M. Burrell

2.6 Production of Vaccines in GM Plants 164
Liz Nicholson, M. Carmen Can˜izares and George P. Lomonossoff
2.7 Prospects for Using Genetic Modification to Engineer
Drought Tolerance in Crops 193
S.G. Mundree, R. Iyer, B. Baker, N. Conrad, E.J. Davis,
K. Govender, A.T. Maredza and J.A. Thomson
2.8 Salt Tolerance 206
Eduardo Blumwald and Anil Grover
2.9 Engineering Fungal Resistance in Crops 225
Maarten Stuiver
PART III SAFETY AND REGULATION 241
3.1 Plant Food Allergens 243
E.N. Clare Mills, John A. Jenkins and Peter R. Shewry
3.2 Environmental Impact and Gene Flow 265
P.J.W. Lutman and K. Berry
3.3 Risk Assessment, Regulation and Labeling 280
Nigel G. Halford
Index 295

Preface
The beginning of the 20th century saw the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work on the
inheritance of phenotypic traits in plants. Mendel’s work laid the foundations of modern,
scientific plant breeding by enabling plant breeders to predict how traits brought into
breeding lines would be inherited, and what had to be done to ensure that the lines would
breed true. As a result, scientific plant breeding from the early part of the 20th century
onwards brought huge increases in crop yield, without which current human population
levels would already be unsustainable.
In the following decades, science made great strides in the elucidation of the molecular
processes that underpin inheritance; genes, the units of inheritance, were linked with
proteins, DNA was shown to be the material of inheritance, the structure of DNA was
resolved, DNA polymerases, ligases and restriction enzymes were discovered, recombinant
DNA molecules were created and techniques for determining the nucleotide
sequence of a DNA molecule were developed.
Plant scientists were quick to exploit the new tools for manipulating DNA molecules
and also made the astounding discovery that a naturally occurring bacterium, Agrobacterium
tumefaciens, actually inserted a piece of its own DNA into that of a plant cell
during its normal infection process. As a result, by the mid-1980s everything was in place
to allow foreign genes to be introduced into crop plants and scientists began to predict a
second green revolution in which crop yield and quality would be improved dramatically
using this new technology.
All plant breeding involves the alteration of plant genes, whether it is through the
crossing of different varieties, the introduction of a novel gene into the gene pool of a
crop species, perhaps from a wild relative, or the artificial induction of random mutations
through chemical or radiation mutagenesis. However, the term ‘genetic modification’ was
used solely to describe the new technique of artificially inserting a single gene or small
group of genes into the DNA of an organism; organisms carrying foreign genes were
termed genetically modified or GM. Another decade passed before the first GM crops
became available for commercial use. Since then, genetic modification has become an
established technique in plant breeding around the world and, in 2004, GM crops were
grown on 81 million hectares in 17 countries.
With the first decade of GM crop cultivation drawing to a close, it seemed appropriate
to assess the successes and failures that have marked that decade, and the prospects of
new GM crop varieties reaching the market in the coming 10 years. This book is intended
for students who are studying plant biotechnology at degree level and for specialists in
academia and industry. It covers the impact of GM crop cultivation in two leading
countries in the commercial application of plant biotechnology, the USA and China, and
the advances being made in the use of genetic modification to increase crop resistance to
biotic and abiotic stresses, improve the processing and nutritional value of crop products
and enable plants to be used for novel purposes such as vaccine production.
GM crop production is, of course, one of the most controversial issues of our time, and
two aspects of GM crops that have worried the public the most, the inadvertent synthesis
of antigens and the risk of gene flow between GM and non-GM crops and wild relatives,
are covered. Governments, particularly in Europe, have responded to public concern over
these issues by introducing rafts of regulations to control GM crop production and use. I
have discussed these in the last chapter.
I am delighted to have been able to bring together leading specialists in different topics
to write the individual chapters, enabling the book to cover the subject comprehensively
and in depth; I owe a debt of gratitude to all the authors who contributed.
Nigel G. Halford