Question

You’ve decided to take up business as a kale farmer; however, a disease has all but decimated the kale industry. You have a gene that can save the kale industry, make it resistant to this disease, but need to get it into the kale genome. Explain how you would insert a transgene into kale to provide it resistance against this disease.

Answer 1

The desired gene (in this case the gene responsible for disease resistance) is inserted into the plant's genome with the help of a vector. For producing transgenic plants the Ti plasmid derived from Agrobacterium tumifaciens is used. This bacteria infects the plant and integrates the gene into the plant's genome because the plasmid contains a T DNA region which can be transferred. So to integrate our gene of interest into Kale plants:

The gene is inserted into the Ti plasmid by using restriction enzymes. The gene is usually attached along with an antibiotic resistance gene which will be useful as a marker later.

The plasmid is then integrated into the bacteria by transformation. The bacteria is grown in a culture to multiply the number.

Kale plant's leaves are taken and cut into small pieces.

The pieces of leaves are infected with the bacteria containing the recombinant plasmid.

The infected leaves when sown give rise to plants that have a modified genome due to which they incur resistance to the disease.