Having successfully completed your studies at Royal Holloway you join a biotechn

Question

Having successfully completed your studies at Royal Holloway you join a biotechnology company in Holland specialized on producing flowers. You were given the task of engineering really deep purple petunia plants. Using your knowledge in biochemistry and molecular biology you transform petunia plants having pink flowers with a construct carrying a gene coding for an enzyme in the biosynthetic pathway of anthocyanin (responsible for the purple colour). You are surprised to find that most transformations were turned to be bear white flowers. How can you explain this finding? How you than can utilize this discovery to engineer crops with beneficial traits.

Explanation / Answer

The color for petunias depends on 2 independent genes. Both the genes should interact to produce the purple color pigment. Consider 2 genes A and B . Both interact to produce purple color in petunia. You removed a construct from the gene carrying only A and left B . So when you engineer you find the flowers white as there is no B gene to produce purple color. That is why the flowers are white. This type of interaction is called Codominance. Both the dominant alleles interact to produce a purple color pigment. Codominance can be benificial in engineering ornamental plants which produces different color of the same plant. If one allele is mutated still it can function dominantly by producing viable protein for its survival.

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