Elementary plant Biochemistry and Biotechnology (2+1)

Flavr savr tomato.

Box 3. Flavr savr tomato

Box 3. Flavr savr tomato.
The tomato has been one of the first targets of plant biotechnology for a number of reasons: 1. Tomatoes are in the same family, the Solanaceae, as tobacco. Tobacco was widely used as a model for plant transformation, so it was fairly easy to develop transformation systems for tomato. 2. There are a number of characteristics of fresh market tomatoes that consumers are unhappy about: quality, flavor and shelf life. Most of the year, fresh tomatoes bought in the store are of very poor quality and have little resemblance to fresh garden tomatoes. The basis for the FLAVR SAVR tomato, the first whole food product of biotechnology, was reducing the expression of polygalacturonase (PG) in tomato fruit and thus slowed down the softening of the fruit. They used the antisense RNA approach to produce plants with reduced expression of PG in fruit. After several reviews by regulatory agencies (like FDA), this product was launched in late 1994.
Apart from these two examples, there are several other biotech products that are commercially available such as Bt cotton, Bt corn, herbicide resistant crops, tissue cultured banana, orchids and number of other horticultural and forestry crops, VAM, P-solubilizing bacteria etc., Advance learners are requested to refer the references/websites given below to get more on these biotech products.