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1301/97 Monitoring of Transgenic Plants with In Vivo Markers The commercial release of certain crop-transgene combinations may be problematic because of the nature of the crop-weedy relatives breeding system and the transgene. If a plant, such as canola or sunflower, is engineered with a transgene that confers fitness to its host, there is a strong possibility that the transgene may be transferred to a wild relative that can persist outside a cultivated environment, ie. it may escape. In this patent pending system, an agricultural gene of interest, such as one conferring hrbicide-, disease-, or insect resistance, is linked with an in vivo marker -- in this case a gene encoding green fluorescent protein (GFP) from jellyfish. Whole plants engineered for GFP fluoresce green under an ultraviolet light while non-transgenic plants fluoresce pink (from chlorophyl). The engineered tobacco plants (B) are easily distinguishable from non-transgenic tobacco (A) under UV light, but non-distinguishable under ambient light conditions. Send for more information to nstewart@goodall.uncg.edu |