Ground-breaking research at the University of Leicester into the division of
chloroplasts holds out hope of a safer way of genetically modifying crops,
with implications for agriculture particularly in the developing world.
Using three plant types - Arabidopsis, tomato and rice - Dr Simon Geir
Møller has been working with colleagues in the University of Leicester
Department of Biology and at the Laboratory of Plant Molecular Biology at
the Rockefeller University in New York to examine how chloroplasts divide in
plants.

Chloroplasts make plants green and are important organelles of plant cells
and vital for life on earth. Chloroplasts perform numerous tasks such as
photosynthesis (generation of oxygen) and the production of amino acids and
fatty acids. They have their own unique, and very small, genome, and are
derived from bacteria.

Comparing cell division in the E. coli bacterium with the way chloroplasts
divide, the research team has isolated a new component of the division
machinery in Arabidopsis, AtMinE1, and they have shown that this protein
represents an evolutionary conserved link between bacterial division and
chloroplast division.

Dr Møller explained: "People have tried for a long time to add genes to the
chloroplast genome and adapt the levels of proteins in them. You can
engineer complex pathways in chloroplasts that you can't achieve in a cell
nucleus.

"The main advantage is that chloroplasts are not spread by pollen, so there
is no environmental hazard in plants genetically modified in this way. In
other words there wouldn't be any cross-pollination or the development of
unwanted 'superweeds'. The gene basically dies with the plant.

"The problem is that so far this has only been done in tobacco and once in
the tomato plant. Our research involves genetically controlled enlarging of
the chloroplasts, so that we can blast them more efficiently with DNA
attached to gold particles encoding valuable proteins followed by
re-manipulation of the division process."

The work was recently published in The Plant Journal, in a report entitled
"The topological specificity factor AtMinE1 is essential for correct plastid
division site placement in Arabidopsis", by Dr Simon Geir Møller and Jodi
Maple of the University of Leicester Department of Biology and Nam-Hai Chua
of the Laboratory of Plant Molecular Biology, the Rockefeller University,
New York.

The research team is also working with collaborators in the USA on putting
vaccines into chloroplasts of plants so that they can be eaten.

The research in the laboratory of Dr Simon Geir Møller is funded by the
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, The Royal Society,
The John Oldacre Foundation, The Ambrose and Ann Appelbe Trust and a HEROBC
Innovation Fellowship funded by HEFCE.