Designing and making the gene construct

Transcript

Dr Richard Espley

When making a transgenic plant, you build what is known as a construct, and that construct contains the gene that you are interested in, the gene you want to test, and then it needs a promoter, and that promoter effectively drives the gene – it makes the gene make messenger RNA, and that gets turned into protein.

So you need a gene, you need a promoter and you need a terminator, and that decides when the gene has stopped transcribing. Apart from that, we put antibiotic-resistant genes in to make it easier for us to select for those plants that have been properly transformed.

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