Approach Toward the Creation of Nonnarcotic Opium Poppy - Morphological and Genetical Analysis on 'Thebaine Poppy' -

Opium poppy (Papaver somniferum L.) is one of the most important medicinal plants, which is used as a sole commercial source of narcotic analgesic, morphine. The transformant of opium poppy we have established by infection of Rhizobium rhizogenes (formerly Agrobacterium rhizogenes) strain MAFF03-01724 showed aberrant morphology and altered opium alkaloid composition. The major alkaloid produced by this transformant was thebaine (16.3%, opium dry weight) instead of morphine. It is likely that this 'thebaine poppy' phenotype was caused by the integration of T-DNA(s) into the poppy genome DNA, and their inserted loci are of great interest. To gain an insight into the mechanism of nonnarcotic thebaine accumulation for the further approach toward the creation of 'codeine poppy' which produces codeine as a major alkaloid, the genetical and morphological analyses on the transformant was carried out. Here we report the results of the detailed analysis on the T-DNA inserted loci of T0 transfromant and the correlation between opium alkaloid composition and segregated T-DNA integration pattern in the self-pollinated T1 transformants.