Abstract
Carotenoids are well-known natural pigments, typically ranging from yellow to red. Carotenoids are industrially utilized as functional materials due to their strong antioxidant properties. Phytoene synthesis is known to be a rate-determining step in the entire carotenoid biosynthetic pathway in plants. We show methods of pathway engineering for the enrichment of carotenoids in flaxseed (linseed; Linum usitatissimum L.), which is an industrially important oleaginous crop. A phytoene synthase gene (crtB) derived from a soil bacterium Pantoea ananatis (formerly called Erwinia uredovora) strain 20D3 was introduced into L. usitatissimum WARD cultivar. The resulting transgenic flax plants formed orange seeds, which contained phytoene, α-carotene, β-carotene, and lutein. The total carotenoid amount in the transgenic seeds was 156 μg/g fresh weight at the maximum, corresponding to 18.6-fold increase compared with that of untransformed controls.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Dr. Takahiko Hayakawa, Plantech Research Institute, for valuable discussion and a gift of the FAE1promoter. The authors also want to thank Ms. Mio Watanabe for examination of flax transformation, Dr. Song-Kang Choi and Dr. Maki Teramoto for construction of pBIScrtB and pBIFcrtB, and Ms. Miyuki Murakami and Ms. Megumi Fujita for assistance in experiments, plant transformation, and cultivation. We also thank NCRPIS, USA, for the supply of flaxseeds. This work has been supported as a part of the project P02001 by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), Japan.
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Fujisawa, M., Misawa, N. (2010). Enrichment of Carotenoids in Flaxseed by Introducing a Bacterial Phytoene Synthase Gene. In: Fett-Neto, A. (eds) Plant Secondary Metabolism Engineering. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 643. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-60761-723-5_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-60761-723-5_14
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