Transgenic Plants / Genetically Modified Crops (GM Crops)

Everything covered so far in this chapter - restriction enzymes, vectors, gene-transfer methods, screening techniques - exists to make one thing possible: deliberately engineering a plant to carry a novel piece of DNA it would never have acquired naturally, producing what this section calls a transgenic plant or genetically modified (GM) crop. This is the chapter's most applied section, and it works through the specific, real-world GM crop categories one at a time: herbicide-tolerant crops (both the glyphosate and Basta tolerance mechanisms), insect-resistant Bt crops (Bt cotton, Bt brinjal, and the Dhara Mustard Hybrid), virus-resistant crops, the FlavrSavr tomato's delayed-ripening trait, Golden Rice's Vitamin-A biofortification, two families of biodegradable bioplastic (PHB and PLA), the Green Fluorescent Protein reporter system, biopharming …