Production of Herbicide-Resistant Transgenic Sweet Potato

Sweet potato, grown in tropical and subtropical countries on approximately 10 million hectares, is the seventh most important food crop cultivated in the world. It is a low-input crop with a stable yield even under suboptimal growing conditions where important cereal food crops do not grow. This is because of its tolerance to drought, and ability to grow on infertile soils and limited inputs. Although traditional breeding methods prove to be effective in improving some agronomic properties of this crop, the absence of herbicide resistant germplasm necessitates the use of in vitro genetic manipulation to produce sweet potato varieties that are resistant to certain herbicides.

By introducing the bar gene from a yeast species through genetic modification, a group of Korean scientists obtained sweet potato lines resistant to the herbicide glufosinate. A critical concern about the use of bar gene is that it may be sexually transmitted to related crop species, resulting in the creation of herbicide-resistant ‘super weeds’. However, this concern is less critical for sweet potato, as this crop is asexually propagated in the field.

Subscribers can read the full paper published by the journal Plant Cell, Tissue and Organ Culture at http://www.springerlink.com/content/x2m428080404435l/fulltext.pdf or read the abstract at http://www.springerlink.com/content/x2m428080404435l/?p=589b324f65d540b2ad192486fd3008db&pi=6.