Abstract
An effective and affordable treatment against malaria is still a challenge for medicine.
Most contemporary drugs either are too expensive to produce or are not effective against
resistant strains of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. The plant Artemisia annua L. is the source of artemisinin, an effective drug against malaria for which no resistant
strains of the bacterium have been reported. However, the artemisinin content of A. annua is very low, which makes its production expensive. Here we report the use of transgenic
technology to increase the artemisinin content of A. annua. We report the production of transgenic plants of A. annua into which we transferred 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl CoA reductase (HMGR) gene from Catharanthus roseus (L.) G. Don using Agrobacterium-mediated gene transfer technology. Transgene integration and copy number were assessed
by PCR and Southern hybridization, which confirmed the stable integration of multiple
copies of the transgene in 7 different transgenic lines of A. annua. The leaf tissue of three of the A. annua transgenic lines possessed significantly higher HMGR activity compared with wild-type
controls, and this activity was associated exclusively with microsomal membranes.
The artemisinin content of the shoots of one of the transgenic lines depicted an increase
of 22.5 % artemisinin content compared with wild-type control A. annua plants.
Key words
Agrobacterium
-
Artemisia annua (Asteraceae) - transgenic -
HMGR
- artemisinin
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Dr. Amjad Masood Husaini
Division of Plant Breeding and Genetics
Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences & Technology of Kashmir
Shalimar
J & K 191121
India
Email: dr.amjadhusaini@hotmail.com
Dr. Malik Zainul Abdin
Centre for Transgenic Plant Development
Department of Biotechnology
Jamia Hamdard
New Delhi
India
Email: mzabdin@rediffmail.com