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Team:BIOSINT Mexico/Chassis
From 2014.igem.org
Arabidopsis - standar chassis in iGEM
Description
In biotechnology plants are mainly used for bioremediation, for the obtainment of industrial products and to generate energy. For these reasons plant manipulation is a focus area in biological engineering. Unfortunately there is not a wide variety of plants projects in iGEM, one reason it's the lack of information in the registry of these organisms.
Arabidopsis thaliana is a model organism that was previously described as chassis. In iGEM 2010, Harvard team use this plant to test their designed vectors for Agrobacterium thumefaciens;
Advantages
- Arabidopsis Thaliana is one of the first eukaryotic experimental model organism
- The knowledge recollect in this plant can be applied in others organism like animal and other eukaryotes
- It allows working with any part of the plant, seeds, leaves, root, flowers.
- It has a short life that make it easy to laboratory work
- The self-reproduction makes it possible to obtain large population of seedlings for specific characteristic or phenotype
- Small genome (114.5 Mb/125 Mb total) has been sequenced in the year 2000.
- Extensive genetic and physical maps of all 5 chromosomes.
- A rapid life cycle (about 6 weeks from germination to mature seed).
- Prolific seed production and easy cultivation in restricted space.
- Efficient transformation methods utilizing Agrobacterium tumefaciens.
- A large number of mutant lines and genomic resources many of which are available from Stock Centers.
- Multinational research community of academic, government and industry laboratories.
Disadvantages
- Is not growing faster as bacteria
- There are not many parts available for plants in the registry.
- At the moment to transforming with A.tumefaciens T-DNA integrates more less randomly in to the plant genome.
