Patent ID: 9603317
Date: 2017-03-28
CPC Classifications: A01H,C07K,C12N

Claim:
1. A method for rapid and accelerated breeding of quality protein maize (QPM) comprising: a) providing seeds from a plant comprising an RNAi construct which acts in a dominant fashion to down modulate expression of 19 and 22 kDa alpha zeins, said down modulation decreasing the vitreous nature of seeds obtained from said plant, said RNAi construct comprising a nucleic acid encoding a selectable marker and a visible reporter gene, said visible reporter gene facilitating identification of cells comprising said RNAi construct; b) propagating said seed from a) and crossing the resulting plant with a QPM plant line; c) obtaining seeds from plants resulting from said cross and harvesting those kernels which exhibit an increased kernel vitreousness and the signal produced by the visible reporter gene when compared to seeds in a) thereby providing a dominant selectable phenotype for elevated lysine and rapid selection of QPM, the method comprising crossing plants obtained from the kernels of c) with a non-QPM line thereby promoting introgression of the QPM trait into said non-QPM line further comprising breeding a transgenic plant from the harvested kernels to yield a progeny plant that has an increase in the amount of at least one amino acid as a dominant trait, said method comprising backcrossing said progeny plant to said non-QPM parent containing a traditional o2 mutation to eliminate the RNAi transgene construct.