Author：Tsui-Feng Li^1,2, Ren-Mong Liao¹, Chien-Young Chu², Junne-Jih Chen³, Robert Griesbach⁴, Chang-Sheng Wang^1,*

¹ Department of Agronomy, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan (equal contribution)
² Department of Horticulture, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan
³ Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute, Council of Agriculture, Taiwan
⁴ Floral and Nursery Plants Research Unit, USDA, ARS, Beltsville, MD, USA
* Author for correspondence: wangchansen@nchu.edu.tw

Abstrct：

    Color is an important trait for many beautiful flower species which are lack of specific colors due to germplasm limitation. This Taiwan-US collaborative project was initiated to overcome the genetic barrier in breeding new color for several important ornamental crops including pigment gene cloning, vector construction, genetic transformation, and mass propagation of transgenic plants. First, a total of 30 anthocyanin related genes of CRWD soybean variety with iRT genotype and a black seedcoats phenotype were cloned for the metabolic engineering in our interest plant species. Second, constructs of cloned genes for overxpression and gene knockout were conducted. Third, agrobacterium mediated transformation systems hava been established in chrysanthemum, poinsettia, phalaenopsis orchid to obtain new color. Cloning and characterization of the cloned genes suggests that the black seedcoats soybean variety contains most complicated anthocyanin biosynthetic pathway and provides the best genetic resource for the metabolic engineering of this pathway. We have been success in engineering flower color by transformation of soybean pigment genes to the above species and confirmed by phenotype, HPLC and/or Southern hybridization.

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