Hello Everyone,

I was thinking that it might be a cool if we could use certain
biologically manipulable species of plants (arabidopsis for instance)
to produce biologically relevant compounds. The rationale for this is
that we can do many genetic manipulations with arabidopsis that we
can't do elsewhere, and the sequence of the entire genome has been
mapped - facilitating the directed targeting of genes and PCR
amplification of relevant enhancer sequences (should the need arise).

Here's my question. If Arabidopsis doesn't have the genes neccessary
to produce a certain biological compound that another plant produces
(say tetrahydracannabidiol, or the irritative compound in poisin ivy)
would it be possible to induce expression of the desired compound
through the ectopic insertion of the relevant pathway genes from the
species which produces the compound.

Have any experiments of this nature been undertaken (pubmed references
would be great)?

If we didn't use arabidopsis to produce our biologically relevant
compound, are there any suggestions on what might be a better host
plant (given that most plants can be readily transformed using
agrobacterium these days)?

Other comments, suggestions are welcomed.