Genetic manipulation
of plants has been practised for hundreds of years with great success
by plant breeders using a process of natural selection. The sexual
crossing of plants has been used to introduce and maintain desirable traits
and increase crop yield. The disadvantage of sexual recombination
is that traits can only be introduced via compatible lines and it is not
possible to introduce a desirable trait and simultaneously exclude an undesirable
one.
Recombinant DNA technology offers the potential to circumvent problems
associated with classical breeding by enabling geneticists to identify
and clone specific genes for desirable
traits and introduce these traits into already useful varieties of plants.
micropipettes used to
aliquot small volumes
benchtop
centrifuge
GeneQuant spectrophotometer
used to determine the
concentration of RNA or DNA
