Biotechnological approaches for the control of plant morphogenesis and their applications in agriculture

Abstract

As plant biotechnology is an application of cell engineering by which the plant cell genome is manipulated to improve agricultural productivity, leading to increases in production, many fundamental questions related to crop improvement arise, such as (i) how to propagate a great number of plants in a small space and within a shorter period of time; (ii) how to control the reversion to juvenility in forest species; (iii) how to decrease the time required to release new varieties to plant producers; (iv) how to control pests without causing environmental pollution; (v) how to regenerate intact transgenic plants after DNA insertion into protoplasts; (vi) how to transfer genetic characters between incompatible plant species; (vii) how to obtain somaclones resistant to adverse conditions; (viii) identification of the molecular mechanisms governing the processes of plant cell morphogenesis and how to control them to obtain better agricultural performance. Many of these questions are being studied in our laboratory and the results are discussed here.Key words: plant biotechnology, micropropagation, transgenic plants, somaclonal variation, hybrid embryo rescue, plant tissue culture.