Experiments on cloning plants and transferring the right genes have been going on for a long time. But the experience with the tree is the first.
By the way, colleagues from the Moscow Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry provided the Belarusian scientists with a new strain of transit bacteria. According to calculations, more than 10 thousand small seedlings can be grown from one tree leaf per year, inserting genes for rapid growth and resistance to environmental pollution into them.
Vladimir Padutov, head of the laboratory of genetics and biotechnology at the Forest Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus: “The transfer mechanism itself is quite simple, there are special bacteria that can transfer their genes to plants, and if we insert the gene we need, they will transfer this gene into plants. Why birch, because this plant is unpretentious, can be used on various soils of Belarus. But now this clone has no economic value. Because we introduced a model gene, we use it to study how the gene works, how the birch genome reacts to the insertion of a foreign gene."
Transgenic engineering is developing rapidly in many countries. So, Holland with its help collects an unprecedented harvest of flowers. From a piece of gerbera stem, you can get up to a million new flowers a year. Belarusian geneticists want to implement a more unusual project: to introduce a radiation resistance gene into a tree in order to obtain clean wood in polluted areas.