Genetic engineering of crop plants
Conrad Lichtenstein1990, Endeavour
Meeting Reports Genetic Engineering of Crop Plants A meeting on "Genetic Engineering of Crop Plants" was held at the University of Nottingham Faculty of Agricultural and Food Science at Sutton Bonington, England on 17-21 April 1989. The meeting was the 49th in the University of Nottingham's long-established Easter School series, but the first on this topic. It was sponsored in part by the ISPMB and attracted over two hundred delegates from eighteen countries. The speakers included representatives from universities, research institutes, and industrial laboratories. The meeting was opened on the Monday eveningby Ted Cocking of Nottingham University, who gave an overview of the state of plant genetic manipulation. One of the most popular areas of study was plant protection; papers on this topic occupied most of the next day. Roger Beachy of Washington University gave an account of his research on resistance to tobacco mosaic virus mediated by coat protein expression in transgenic tobacco. David Baulcombe of the Sainsbury Laboratory told of several important domains identified in cucumber mosaic virus satellite RNA which seem to have different effects in transgenic plants. This work offered the promise of a genetically engineered satellite RNA which would offer good protection without production of any symptoms. By recombining the DNA of phenotypically different strains of cauliflower mosaic virus, Simon Covey of the AFRC IPSR laboratory has identified a number of possible hostpathogen interactions associated with specific regions of the DNA which may be used in plant protection. M.G.K. Jones of the AFRC Institute of Arable Crops Research had approached the problem of virus resistance in a different manner by transferring resistance from Solanum brevidens to Solanum tuberosum by somatic hybridisation. As well as an account of the work itself, there was a full discussion of U.K. regulatory policy as it affected field work. The use of Bacillus thuringiensis toxin to confer resistance of plants to insects was one of the topics discussed by Jan Leemans of Plant Genetic Systems, Gent, and by Chuck Gasser of Monsanto, St. Louis. The issue of B. thuringiensis toxins attracted much attention as one of the aspects of genetic engineering of crops which may be close to practical exploitation, especially in protection against tobacco hornworm and tomato pinworm. Vaughan Hilder of Durham University described a novel approach to insect resistance which depends upon the production in transgenic plants of a trypsin inhibitor from the seeds of cowpea. Initial results were promising, which raised the interesting philosophical problem of why evolution had not provided the vegetative parts of cowpea with resistance of this type. Studies on tomato, ~oybean and rape plants resistant to
