The Functional Identification of Plant Rubber Biosynthetic Genes.

该项目的目标是确定天然橡胶如何在植物中合成。天然橡胶是生产日常生活中所需的数千种产品所必需的。由于其上级性能特性，天然橡胶在许多产品的制造中是不可替代的材料，例如汽车和飞机轮胎。令人惊讶的是，即使具有高度的经济和战略重要性，橡胶的生物合成也没有得到很好的表征。50多年的生物化学实验至今未能确定植物中橡胶生物合成所需的蛋白质。这主要是由于膜相关的橡胶生物合成机制对经典生物化学方法的纯化具有抗性。为了解决这个问题，蛋白质组学，基因组学和反向遗传分析将被用来从两个超级生产橡胶物种，银胶菊（银胶菊）和俄罗斯蒲公英（蒲公英kok-saghyz）的橡胶生物合成所需的基因/蛋白质功能鉴定。这里使用的新方法代表了推进我们对植物中橡胶生物合成的知识的最快速的手段，并将导致鉴定调节天然橡胶的数量和质量的基因/蛋白质。从这项研究中产生的基因资源将用于改进目前的橡胶生产作物，并通过基因工程和分子育种方法开发替代橡胶生产的国内作物。国内橡胶生产作物的发展将为美国公众带来许多好处，包括：1）减少对进口天然橡胶的依赖，2）为美国农民创造新的高价值商品作物，3）为乳胶过敏者提供橡胶树衍生橡胶的低过敏替代品，以及4）预计将从橡胶生产制剂中获得20，000个高质量的EST序列，这些序列将立即在GenBank上提供。克隆这些EST的将提供没有达到通过限制和象征性收费。

The goal of this project is to determine how natural rubber is synthesized in plants. Natural rubber is required for the manufacture of thousands of products needed in daily life. Due to its superior performance properties, natural rubber is an irreplaceable material in the manufacture of many products, such as automobile and aircraft tires. Surprisingly, even with its high economic and strategic importance, the biosynthesis of rubber has been poorly characterized. Move than fifty years of biochemical experimentation has so far failed to identify the proteins required for rubber biosynthesis in plants. This is primarily due to the fact that the membrane associated rubber biosynthetic machinery is resistant to purification by classic biochemical methods. To circumvent this problem, proteomics, genomics and reverse genetic analyses will be used to functionally identify the genes/proteins required for rubber biosynthesis from two hyper-producing rubber species, guayule (Parthenium argentatum) and Russian dandelion (Taraxacum kok-saghyz). The novel approach used here represents the most rapid means of advancing our knowledge of rubber biosynthesis in plants and will lead to identification of genes/proteins that regulate the quantity and quality of natural rubber. The gene-based resources generated from this research will be used for the improvement of current rubber producing crops and the development of alternative rubber producing domestic crops through genetic engineering and molecular breeding approaches. The development of domestic rubber producing crops will provide a number of benefits to the American public including: 1) decreased dependence on imported natural rubber, 2) the creatation of a new high value commodity crops for the American farmer, 3) the generation of a hypoallergenic alternatives to Hevea derived rubber for persons with latex allergies and 4) decreased dependence on petroleum for the synthesis of synthetic polymers.It is anticipated that 20,000 high quality EST sequences will be obtained from rubber producing preparations and these will be immediately made available on GenBank. Clones for these EST's will be made available without reach-through restrictions and for a nominal fee.