Plant culture and plant transgenics

For Biotechnology course

1. Describe Gregor Mendel’s experiments. What were some important conclusions from this work?
2. Compare traditional breeding, mutation breeding, and transgenic approaches to creating new kinds of plants.
3. Many plant cells are totipotent. In what ways can plant researchers make use of this trait?
4. What does “Ti” stand for in Ti plasmid? What kind of cells are found in the “T”?  What cells make use of the “opines” generated from the gene products of the T-DNA?
5. What is a two-component system? What are the roles of VirA and VirG in Agrobacterium?
6. What DNA elements are removed from Ti plasmids in order to provide “room” for transgenes to fit? What types of transgenes would be introduced into the Ti plasmid?
7. What is a gene gun?
8. What reporter genes can be used to identify successful transgene integration into the plant genome?
9. How can you get rid of the reporter gene? Is this necessary?  Where does the loxP “scar” come from?