Nutritional enhancement of staple cereal crops for vitamin E and carotenoids
2012
Zorrilla López, U.
Vitamin deficiencies mostly affect impoverished people in developing countries because poor people cannot afford a diversified diet. Plants provide nearly all essentials vitamins required to maintain health and well-being in humans. However, most staple food crops, particularly the major cereals maize and rice are deficient in key vitamins, amongst other micronutrients. Transgenic approaches hold great promise in alleviating, to a major extend such micronutrient deficiencies as exemplified by numerous reports in the literature over the past decade. Thus generating cereal grains with a substantially enhanced content of vitamins E and A is an entirely feasible proposition. Such experiments are now possible as a result of our ability to clone all genes required for meaningful metabolic engineering, coupled with the development of effective multi-gene transfer methodology, applicable to the major target crops. In order to accomplish the project objectives of enhancing cereal crops with vitamins we have cloned key genes involved in the vitamin E and carotenoids biosynthetic pathways. Using combinatorial genetic transformation we recovered independent rice callus and plant lines with a combinatorial complement of carotenoid genes (Zmpsy1, PacrtI and Ator), maize lines with the Ator gene, and a number of rice lines containing combinations of Atpds1, Athpt1, Atvte3 and Atvte4, genes involved in vitamin E biosynthesis. We report results from the above experiments and we indicate ongoing experiments to completely characterize the transgenic plant populations we have generated.
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