Biochemical pathway simulation to model the hypoxic response in tumors

• Book ID: 101724976
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 66 KB
• Volume: 97
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0006-3592
• DOI: 10.1002/bit.21474

✦ Synopsis

Rhizoremediation is a technology based on plant-microbe interactions to remove contaminants in soil. Plants not only provide nutrients for rhizobacteria but also concentrate pollutants, initiate their degradation, and make the resulting degradation products available for further metabolism. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are major persistent environmental contaminants. Biphenyl dioxygenase (BPDO) is a bacterial enzyme that initiates PCB degradation in soil and is a complex of three proteins, one of which is a heterodimer. In recent years, BPDO has been engineered to enhance its catalytic properties towards PCBs. If expressed in plants, a novel PCB rhizoremediation process could be at hand. However, producing an active BPDO in plants requires the introduction and coordinate expression of four transgenes. As a first step toward this goal, Mohammadi and co-workers produced transgenic tobacco plants that expressed each of the bacterial BPDO proteins and showed that the individual components were enzymatically active.