Thousands of microshoots of Draper blueberry plants can be propagated in tissue culture in just a few months. (Photo by Kurt Stepnitz, Michigan State University)
The projects that are currently underway at the MSU Plant Transformation Center focus on:
 Blueberry
Sweet and sour cherry
Celery
These projects strive to enhance certain genes in fruit and vegetable plants to create healthier plants that:
Need less pesticide
Stay fresh longer
Deal better with weather and harvesting stress
enhance animal and human health
"Biotechnology is not going to replace traditional methods -- it augments them.
It allows us to create crops that can be produced in more environmentally friendly and sustainable ways."
-- Wayne Loescher, MSU
horticulturist (from Futures magazine, Spring 2005, vol. 23, no. 1)
Environmental Risks
The Douches PP
Crop Biotechnology Workshop
Objectives:
Devise tissue culture regeneration systems blueberry and sour and sweet cherry to enable future transformaton studies.
Produce transgenic celery plants with herbicide resistance.
Progress in adapting biotechnology is limited because tissue culture regeneration systems and stable transformation protocols have not been established. These projects will build upon successful research efforts to devise systems and protocols for selected crops. Initial efforts will focus on celery, blueberry, and sour and sweet cherry.
The tissue culture regeneration base for blueberry and sour cherry is now set to carry out transient expression studies ? that is, defining the optimum conditions among many biological factors to produce stable transformed crops with desired genes.
Transgenic celery plants with herbicide resistance have been confirmed, and seed production for field tests is underway.
Applying genetic engineering techniques is now possible in blueberry, and work is nearing completion in sour and sweet cherry.
Celery plants with resistance to the glufosinate herbicide have been produced.
Determine how the herbicide resistance is inherited in celery plants and whether it holds up under field conditions.
Interest has been expressed in incorporating herbicide resistance in blueberry.
Incorporating resistance to viral diseases in sour cherry will be approached through genetic engineering.
Similar projects are proposed with Fraser fir and strawberry.
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