Life Sciences Commons^™

Transgenic Plant-Produced Hydrolytic Enzymes And The Potential Of Insect Gut-Derived Hydrolases For Biofuels, Jonathan D. Willis, Mitra Mazarei, C. Neal Stewart Jr.

Plant Sciences Publications and Other Works

Various perennial C4 grass species have tremendous potential for use as lignocellulosic biofuel feedstocks. Currently available grasses require costly pre-treatment and exogenous hydrolytic enzyme application to break down complex cell wall polymers into sugars that can then be fermented into ethanol. It has long been hypothesized that engineered feedstock production of cell wall degrading (CWD) enzymes would be an efficient production platform for of exogenous hydrolytic enzymes. Most research has focused on plant overexpression of CWD enzyme-coding genes from free-living bacteria and fungi that naturally break down plant cell walls. Recently, it has been found that insect digestive tracts harbor …

Simultaneous Knockdown Of Six Non-Family Genes Using A Single Synthetic Rnai Fragment In Arabidopsis Thaliana, Olaf Czarnecki, Anthony C. Bryan, Sara S. Jawdy, Xiaohan Yang, Zong-Ming Cheng, Jin-Gui Chen, Gerald A. Tuskan

Plant Sciences Publications and Other Works

Background

Genetic engineering of plants that results in successful establishment of new biochemical or regulatory pathways requires stable introduction of one or more genes into the plant genome. It might also be necessary to down-regulate or turn off expression of endogenous genes in order to reduce activity of competing pathways. An established way to knockdown gene expression in plants is expressing a hairpin-RNAi construct, eventually leading to degradation of a specifically targeted mRNA. Knockdown of multiple genes that do not share homologous sequences is still challenging and involves either sophisticated cloning strategies to create vectors with different serial expression constructs …

Construction Of High Resolution Genetic Linkage Maps To Improve The Soybean Genome Sequence Assembly Glyma1.01, Qijian Song, Jerry Jenkins, Gaofeng Jia, David L. Hyten, Vince Pantalone, Scott A. Jackson, Jeremy Schmutz, Perry B. Cregan

Plant Sciences Publications and Other Works

Background

A landmark in soybean research, Glyma1.01, the first whole genome sequence of variety Williams 82 (Glycine max L. Merr.) was completed in 2010 and is widely used. However, because the assembly was primarily built based on the linkage maps constructed with a limited number of markers and recombinant inbred lines (RILs), the assembled sequence, especially in some genomic regions with sparse numbers of anchoring markers, needs to be improved. Molecular markers are being used by researchers in the soybean community, however, with the updating of the Glyma1.01 build based on the high-resolution linkage maps resulting from this research, …