XVI International Botanical Congess

Environmental stresses, such as low temperature, drought and pathogen infection constitute a major constraint in crop productivity. Attempts were being made to alter the stressful environment to fit the plant. But such attempts are either impossible or economically prohibitive. Therefore, emphasis has been shifted to engineer the plants with new characteristics such as stress tolerance or disease resistance. For isolation of such specific plant genes we have employed T-DNA tagging and in vivo gene fusion in Arabidopsis thaliana. We have screened 4000 T-DNA tagged lines and isolated one that exhibits an induced activity of the gus reporter gene when exposed to the plants stress hormone abscisic acid, ABA but not to low temperature. Progeny analysis and inverse PCR-based cloning of the T-DNA flanking plant DNA are in progress.