Life Sciences Commons^™

The Performance Of Bacterial Phytosensing Transgenic Tobacco Under Field Conditions, Michael Harrison Fethe

Masters Theses

Currently the platforms for wide-area detection of environmental contamination are limited. Therefore, there is interest in developing new platforms, especially for use in crop plants to detect and report the presence of biotic and abiotic stress agents. A biosensor uses a biological organism or substrate to detect the presence of an elicitor (i.e., heavy metal, TNT, or bacteria). The foundational groundwork to create biosensors in transgenic plants exists. The creation of bacterial phytosensing transgenic tobacco containing an orange fluorescent protein (OFP) reporter driven by synthetic pathogen-inducible promoters provides a fluorescent signal when infected with phytopathogens for earlier detection in the …