Recent Advances in Plant Genetic Engineering

This book presents recent innovations in plant virus expression systems and their uses for producing biologics from plants, advances in the glycoengineering in plant to allow human-like glycomodification and optimization of desired glycan structures for enhancing safety and functionality of recombinant pharmaceutical glycoproteins, highlights progress in the development of transgenic drought-tolerant rice plants, with special attention paid to field trial investigations, reviews the recent progress in the potential utilization of transcription factors involved in plant abiotic stress responses to improve multiple stress tolerance of crops in the field conditions, describes recent advances and problems of soybean transformation, new tools for chloroplast genetic engineering to allow the synthesis of human growth hormone in the green alga, recent transgenic studies on abiotic stress tolerance and molecular breeding in potato, approaches attempting to increase the vitamin B1 in crop plants. This book also includes the recent case studies covering the diverse perspective directions of plant genetic engineering such as improving maize nutritive quality and salt tolerance, increasing the artemisinin content in Artemisia annua plants to improve the availability of this one of the most effective and much-needed drug for malaria, manipulating phytoalexins to increase the disease resistance of plants. The current status of the various applications of the CRISPR/Cas system in plants, where it is used for the successful generation of stable mutations in a steadily growing number of species, gene targeting challenges in plants and their overcoming via intra genomic homologous recombination, antisense approaches and currently applied breakthrough RNAi studies in cotton are discussed. Undesired epigenetic silencing in transgenic technology is summarized.