Abstract
The introduction and expression of foreign genes in plants1–3 will advance our understanding of plant molecular biology and should allow the introduction of new agronomically valuable traits into crop plants. The source of potentially useful genes is large (any living organism may be a donor), but identification of these genes remains difficult. We present here an example of how a gene for herbicide tolerance, an agronomically important trait, can be found in a bacterium and introduced into plants. The herbicide glyphosate inhibits a metabolic step in the biosynthesis of aromatic compounds and the aroA gene encodes the inhibited enzyme in bacteria. Therefore, we introduced a mutant allele of this gene that encodes an enzyme less sensitive to glyphosate into tobacco plants. Expression of this gene enhanced tolerance to glyphosate in transformed plants.
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Comai, L., Facciotti, D., Hiatt, W. et al. Expression in plants of a mutant aroA gene from Salmonella typhimurium confers tolerance to glyphosate. Nature 317, 741–744 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1038/317741a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/317741a0
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