Plant Science 160 (2001) 367
Book review
www.elsevier.com/locate/plantsci
Biotechnology in Agriculture and Forestry 45, Transgenic Medicinal Plants
Edited by Y.P.S. Bajaj, Springer-Verlag Berlin/
Heidelberg/New York, 1999, pp. 372. ISBN 3-540-65120-9; US$ 249.00.
In the Springer series, Biotechnology in Agricul-ture and Forestry 45, the volume entitled, Trans-genic Medicinal Plants (1999), is a welcome arrival. It deals with attempts, using genetic trans-formation, to exploit the ability of plants to func-tion as chemical factories. Plant secondary metabolites have served in medicine since prehis-toric times, and many of our current drugs are based on natural products. It is now theoretically possible to use molecular genetics to direct the synthesis of almost any substance in plants. Chem-ical farming could supplant much of the agricul-ture that currently produces food surpluses. This would of course require GMO release, a ‘no – no’ in Europe, but what about production in vitro, using transformed cells or organs? The majority of the 26 chapters in this book seriously consider this possibility. Unfortunately, none shows that it is of economical interest.
Genetic transformation has the potential to quantitatively enhance or qualitatively modify the production of secondary metabolites. Enhance-ment has been demonstrated by producing trans-formed or ‘hairy’ root cultures with Agrobacterium rhizogenes. For some unexplained reason transfer of root-inducing (Ri) DNA from this bacterium to plant cells of numerous dicot species causes roots to form and grow in vitro. More curiously they sometimes overproduce sec-ondary metabolites. There are 36 photographs of these root cultures in this book and 38 index entries concerning A. rhizogenes and transformed roots. (22 out of the 26 chapters deal with these phenomena.) In rare cases qualitative modification
is also achieved after transformation with A. rhi-zogenes, but it receives little attention in this book. The obvious pay-off is in modifying existing synthetic pathways and creating new ones, using resident genes and genes from other organisms. One can easily imagine changing a promoter, in-hibiting a branch point or even adding enzymatic steps to an existing pathway. Ultimately, whole new pathways could be engineered to produce or convert substances as exotic as plastics or super-conductors. Unfortunately, we do not find much of this sort of research mentioned here, and that included is an extension of work published eight years ago. In fact most of the research described in this book is a reiteration of experiments done in the early 1980s, simply applied to other species. The book thus provides a catalogue of what works, but leaves us wanting more, much more. Let us hope that genome sequencing will provide the genes and the insights necessary for the full exploitation of the biosynthetic potential of plants, and this book will come to the attention of high tech science mongers who will realize that there is much to gain and can make it happen.
Although the general quality of printing and presentation is high, the table of contents suffers from a lack of detail in the headings, with almost every chapter using the same three or four major sections. One is obliged to rely on the index when searching for information, and although func-tional, the index offers only a sample of the book’s contents.
David Tepfer
Laboratoire de Biologie de la,
Rhizosphere,
INRA,
Route de Saint-Cyr, 78026 Versailles, Cedex,
France
.
