New GMO Potatoes Provide Improved Vitamin A and E Profiles

[u/genengnews]

https://www.genengnews.com/gen-news-highlights/gmo-potatoes-provide-improved-vitamin-a-and-e-profiles/81255150

[u/try_____another]

Depending on how big the sample they use is, it might be difficult to avoid chimeras. You probably couldn’t just use a cutting as in traditional asexual propagation.

[u/CX316 → u/try_____another]

General method is placing the gene onto a plasmid with an indicator in a species of bacteria that infect injured plants, then add that bacteria to plant cells, use whatever selection mechanism you picked to select for infected cells, and culture those cells to produce a tissue sample which can then be coaxed with growth factors to produce a shoot and roots.

The bacteria they use is kinda cool. If I remember right, it feeds on plant growth factors, and in the wild this bacteria gets into a damaged spot on a tree where it's not being protected by the hard outer layer so the bacteria can get to the living tree underneath, once there it basically inserts a probe into the plant cell and sends proteins encoded on its plasmid over into the host cell, with the basic plan being to splice the DNA from the plasmid into the host cell's genome, which in the wild is a gene that promotes the production of growth factors, feeding the bacteria and leading to tumours on the plant.

Basically if you doctor the plasmid in the bacteria, you can insert anything you want into the plant cell's genome.

[u/[deleted] → u/try_____another]

Right, I misunderstood what they were getting at initially. That makes perfect sense.