Isolation and Characterization of Plant Genes

For more than a decade molecular biology has offered the tools to isolate plant genes and to analyze their structures. In general, knowledge of the gene product is a prerequisite for gene isolation. In the first part of this chapter the methodologies available for plant gene isolation are discussed and the examples described. The strategy for gene isolation depends on the abundancy of the gene product as well as on the knowledge of the expression pattern or primary structure of the gene and encoded protein. The second part will deal with molecular techniques which can be applied to isolate genes of which the gene products are unknown. For many genes isolated by the methods described so far it is often difficult to prove that the clone contains the desired gene. A major interest of plant biology is on development, cell differentiation, and cell response to environmental factors at the molecular level.