Some Achievements 1. Improved Nutritional Quality 2. How they work 6. Biopharmaceuticals Transgenic Plants Progress is being made on several fronts to introduce new traits into plants using recombinant DNA technology. The genetic manipulation of plants has been going on since the dawn of agriculture, but until recently this has required the slow and tedious process of cross-breeding varieties.
Genetic engineering promises to speed the process and broaden the scope of what can be done.
Making transgenic plants There are several methods for introducing genes into plants, including infecting plant cells with plasmids as vectors carrying the desired gene shooting microscopic pellets containing the gene directly into the cell. In contrast to animals, there is no real distinction between somatic cells and germline cells. Somatic tissues of plants, e.g., root cells grown in culture, can be transformed in the laboratory with the desired gene grown into mature plants with flowers. If all goes well, the transgene will be incorporated into the pollen and eggs and passed on to the next generation. In this respect, it is easier to produce transgenic plants than transgenic animals .