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Giant tobacco plants that stay young forever
Date:1/10/2013

The life of tobacco plants is short. They grow for around three to four months, followed by flowering and then die. Their size is also limited, with plants only growing to about one-and-a-half to two meters tall. Now, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME in Mnster have located the tobacco plant's very own fountain of youth, which means they can keep it forever young. The Mnster-based researchers discovered a genetic switch which can prevent the plants from change blooming to flowering. This also averts the plants' early change demise to senescence and suppresses the factor that halts growth. "The first of our tobacco plants is now almost eight years old but it still just keeps on growing and growing," says Professor Dirk Prfer, head of the Department of Functional and Applied Genomics at the IME. "Although we regularly cut it, it's six-and-a-half meters tall. If our greenhouse were a bit higher, it would probably be even bigger. Its stem is already ten centimeters in diameter." Whereas in normal tobacco plants the leaves, which grow from the bottom of the stem, soon turn yellow and drop off, the IME plant's leaves stay healthy and green. This is why the scientists have christened their modified plant species "forever young".

But what exactly do researchers do to give the plants eternal youth and make them capable of unbounded growth? "We modify the expression of a certain gene or rather, the information contained within it so that the plant's flowering is delayed," explains Prfer. Researchers then insert the modified gene back into the plant using a bacterium. The role of the bacterium is to act as a sort of shuttle service for the modified gene.

Producing more biomass

The principle is transferable and could be used on other kinds of plants; at the moment, the scientists are working also on potato plants on behalf of a Japanese chemical company. They use their knowledge to get c
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Contact: Dirk Prfer
dirk.pruefer@ime.fraunhofer.de
49-251-832-2302
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
Source:Eurekalert  

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