Discovery of new method for preventing gene flow in maize pollen

AN UNEXPECTED METHOD FOR CONTROLLING CORN POLLEN DISPERSAL
Paul Scott at ISB, Virginia Tech

Two reports describe the characterization of experimental transgenic maize plants containing a wheat genomic DNA fragment encoding the Glu1-Dx5 gene. In their initial evaluation of these plants, the authors unexpectedly determined that the wheat genomic fragment exhibited maternal inheritance in all four of the events that were characterized. The second report characterizes the mechanism that confers maternal inheritance to this transgene and demonstrates that this transgene can be used to prevent the transfer of another transgene (an herbicide resistance gene) to other plants through pollen.

Complete article:
pdf: http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2007/artspdf/nov0704.pdf
web: http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2007/news07.nov.htm#nov0704