Confirming the plants are transgenic

Transcript

Dr Richard Espley

When we have transformed a plant, what we need to look at is how successfully that is done. We can analyse gene integration at a very early stage –  even from the plantlet stage, we’d work out where our transgene has been integrated into the genome of, for example, apple.

We now have the whole apple genome so we know pretty much the whole DNA sequence. So we can do a fairly simple procedure called PCR – polymerase chain reaction – to work out where our transgene is in the apple genome.

And we can also work out how many times that transgene has been integrated into the genome – it may be more than once, for example – and we need to know this because it might affect the way the plant performs.

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