Scientists Use Chloroplast GE to Improve Vitamin E in Tobacco and Lettuce

Vitamin E (tocopherol/Toc) is a vital lipid-soluble antioxidant produced in the chloroplasts. Of the eight different forms of vitamin E, α-Toc has the highest activity in humans. To develop biotech plants with improved vitamin E activity, Yukinori Yabuta of Tottori University in Japan and colleagues used chloroplast genetic engineering. This resulted to the production of three types of transformed tobacco plants (pTTC, pTTMT and pTTC-TMT) containing the Toc cyclase (TC) γ-Toc methyltransferase (γ-TMT) gene and the TC plus γ-TMT genes as an operon in the plastid genome, respectively. A significant increase in the vitamin E levels was observed in pTTC plants due to an increase in γ-Toc. The composition of the vitamin E was different in the pTTMT plants compared with the wild-type tobacco plants. In the pTTC-TMT plants, total vitamin E levels increased and α-Toc was a major form of vitamin E.

The research team employed the same technique to increase the vitamin E levels in lettuce plants. This led to the increase vitamin E concentration and activity in the transgenic lettuce plants. Based on these findings, chloroplast genetic engineering is an effective tool in improving the vitamin E quantity and quality in plants.

Read the abstract at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11248-012-9656-5.