Gene technology

  Your company is growing plants that produce very valuable chemical X in roots. Genes responsible for the biosynthesis of this metabolite are Gene XA, GeneXB and GeneXC. These genes express only in roots because of the root-specific transcription factor, TFX, which regulates them. These plants cannot be used for the commercial production of X because: Collecting the roots will kill plants, so you need to re-grow them often; Roots are small in sizes (root’s biomass is not big) As a result, it is not easy to collect enough biomass from roots every year for the commercial production of X. To increase the production of the chemical X your company decided to re-direct the production of chemical X from roots to leaves of the same plants. The rationales behind this decision are: These plants have big leaves, To collect leaves, you do not need to kill plants and re-grow them, Leaves and roots have the same genome, so all genes involved in the production of X exist in leaves. You are the lucky postdoc who has to run this project. You need to designe a strategy to conduct this project. For commercial production of the generated transgenic plants under field conditions, they have to meet modern (advanced) genetic engineering conditions. You need to: 1. Design a transgene and explain its every component (you can design more than one transgene): 20 marks 2. Design the vector that contains your transgene: 20 marks 3. Design a strategy for the generation of the transgenic plant: 20 marks 4. Design a strategy to confirm your generated plant: 10 marks 5. Expression of genes X in leaves could change the expression profiles of other genes. How can you assess the global molecular changes in leaf cells? : 20 marks 6. Which adverse effects do you expect in your experiment: 10 marks?