Transgenic Plants in Modern Agriculture

With the development of methodologies to introduce and express foreign genes in plant cells, in less than two decades it has been possible to produce transgenic plants with improved insect and disease resistance, seeds and fruits with enhanced nutritional qualities, and plants that are better adapted to adverse environmental conditions. Transgenic plants producing vaccines for important human diseases and other important products have also been developed. Many more agronomic and quality traits are currently been engineered in both academic and industrial laboratories and the application of new strategies to improve plants by transgenic technology is only limited by our poor knowledge of plant gene function. The new functional genomic strategies for the identification and characterization of genes promise to provide a wealth of information with an enormous potential to genetically engineer plants for specific purposes.