Giant Tobacco Plants That Stays 'Young Forever'
The life of tobacco plants is short. They grow for around three to four months, followed by flowering and then die. Their size is also limited, with plants only growing to about one-and-a-half to two meters tall.
Now, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME in Münster, Germany have located the tobacco plant’s very own fountain of youth, which means they can keep forever young. The Münster-based researchers discovered a genetic switch which can prevent the plants from blooming to flowering. This also averts the plants’ early change demise to senescence – and halts growth.
But what exactly do researchers do to give the plants eternal youth and make them capable of limitless growth? ‘We modify the expression of a certain gene – or rather, the information contained within it – so that the plant’s flowering is delayed,’ explains Prüfer. Researchers then insert the modified gene back into the plant using a bacterium. The role of the bacterium is to act as a sort of shuttle service for the modified gene.
The principle is transferable and could be used on other kinds of plants; at the moment, the scientists are working on potato plants on behalf of a Japanese chemical company. They use their knowledge to get crops to yield a far greater amount of biomass. In the case of potatoes, this means a great deal more starch.
Preventing plants from flowering, presents a significant advantage, in that no flowering means no production of seeds or pollen. As a result, plants have no way of reproducing, which means they cannot spread into the environment in an unplanned way.
In the future, the researchers want to go further and be able to disable plants’ growth limits using chemical mutagenesis – that is to say, using normal growing techniques. This process involves using chemical additives to bring about changes in a seed’s DNA sequence.
The advantage is that a plant grown in this way would no longer be genetically modified but simply a plant grown using standard techniques. ‘But in order to be able to do that, we first need to gain a better understanding of the deregulation of genes,’ says Prüfer, who hopes cultivation experiments might begin next year. Then perhaps normal plants will be in a position to grow tall, too.
Contacts and sources:
Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME
http://www.fraunhofer.de/en.html
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