Abstract
Fructans serve as a carbohydrate reserve in many plant species and are also synthesised by several microorganisms. Over the past decade interest in the use of fructans for food and non-food applications has increased exponentially. Our interest is to modify crops for the production of tailor-made fructans. Therefore we introduced genes encoding bacterial fructosyltransferases into several non-fructan storing plants, e.g. tobacco and potato. Different cellular targeting sequences were used for the expression of the bacterial levansucrases in transgenic tobacco and potato plants resulting in varying levels of fructan and often in changes in the phenotype.
Plant fructan biosynthetic genes have also been cloned and this greatly expands the opportunities for the production of tailor-made fructans in transgenic plants. Introduction of the onion gene encoding the enzyme fructan:fructan 6-glucosyl fructosyltransferase, a key enzyme in the formation of the inulin neoseries, into chicory enables this crop to synthesise the inulin neoseries in addition to linear inulin.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Vijn, I. et al. (1999). Expression of fructosyltransferase genes in transgenic plants. In: Kruger, N.J., Hill, S.A., Ratcliffe, R.G. (eds) Regulation of Primary Metabolic Pathways in Plants. Proceedings of the Phytochemical Society of Europe, vol 42. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4818-4_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4818-4_11
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