Abstract
Plants produce not only oxygen and food, which are essential items for animals to survive, but also various metabolites such as medical materials. Manipulation of a metabolic pathway by genetic engineering would be a useful strategy to alter useful metabolites quantitatively and/or qualitatively. Because it becomes evident that transcription factors organize the expression of multiple genes for metabolic enzymes that act in the same metabolic pathway, it is expected that modification of a transcription factor would be efficient to control of metabolic pathway and to enhance production of useful compounds. We developed a novel gene silencing system, called Chimeric Repressor Gene- Silencing Technology (CRES-T), in which a transcription factor that is converted into strong repressor by fusion with EAR-motif repression domain (SRDX), induce dominant negative phenotype similar to loss-of-function of the alleles of the gene for transcription factor by suppressing target genes dominantly. Using CRES-T system, we are screening transcription factors that could regulate metabolic pathway. We successfully identified several transcription factors that regulate various metabolic pathways.
