Transgenic Tomato Expressing The Human Acidic Fibroblast Growth Factor (of Afgf)

To date, in human beings, the fibroblast growth factor (FGF) superfamily consists of 22 members. FGFs can induce proliferation of various types of cells, including fibroblast, endothelial cells, chondrocytes, smooth muscle cells, melanocytes as well as other cells. They can also promote adipocyte differentiation, induce macrophage and fibroblast IL-6 production, stimulate astrocyte migration, and prolong neuronal survival. By acting extracellularly through four tyrosine kinase FGF receptors, FGFs play substantial roles in development, angiogenesis, hematopoiesis, and tumorigenesis. As a member of this superfamily, human acidic fibroblast growth factor (aFGF or FGF1), expressed by a variety of cells from all three germ layers, shows great potential for clinical applications for therapy of a variety of diseases, such as Parkinson's disease, spinal cord contusion injury, neural regeneration in reimplantation of broken-off finger, brain ischemia, renal ischemia, myocardial infarction, occlusive vascularitis, retinal ischemia, gastric ulcer and nonhealing wound and so on.To meet the increasing demand of this expensive cytokine, we expressed it in transgenic plantSo This is a promising way for producing therapeutic proteins in large scale because of its safety, low expense and ease to manipulate. We constructed a binary vector carrying a modified human afgf gene and a manA gene that allows the use of PMI selection system, an antibiotic and herbicide-free system, during the transformation procedure. We produced transgenic tomato plants by an Agrobacterium tumefacien-mediated method.PCR-Southern blot and RT-PCR revealed integration of afgf gene in the plant genome and successful its transcription in transgenic plant cells.