Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #plantmolecularbiology
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#PlantScienceClassics #9: The CaMV 35S promoter. In 1985 Joan T. Odell & Ferenc Nagy from Nam-Hai Chua’s lab describe the Cauliflower mosaic virus 35S promoter @Nature, enabling researchers to ubiquitously expression their genes of interest in plants. doi.org/10.1038/313810… 
The early 1980s were an important time for #PlantMolecularBiology: Among other things, plant transformation had just been established. But when introducing a gene into a plant, it requires regulatory sequences to activate its expression – and none active in plants were known.
In fact, the first transgenic plant published by the lab of Mary-Dell Chilton in 1984 in @CellCellPress had exactly this problem: They had introduced the yeast ADH1 gene without any regulatory sequences, and hence it was not expressed.
#PlantScienceClassics #6: The T-DNA. In a 1977 paper, Mary-Dell Chilton & colleagues identify the Transferred DNA (T-DNA), the bit of DNA that Agrobacterium tumefaciens inserts into the plant genome, to kick off the race toward the first transgenic plant. doi.org/10.1016/0092-8…
It was known since before the 1940s, that Agrobacterium could induce tumors (‘crown galls’) on plants, & that these tumors then grow autonomously of the bacterium, meaning that the plant had been permanently ‘transformed’. But the molecular details for the process were not known.
Armin Braun already speculated in 1947 that DNA may be involved in this transformation process. But research really took off in 1967, when Rob Schilperoort showed that Agrobacterium RNA could hybridize with crown gall DNA,indicating that bacterial DNA had indeed been transferred.
