• Journal of Plant Biotechnology
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.69-77
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• 2002

Oxidative stress derived from reactive oxygen species (ROS) is one of the major damaging factors in plants exposed to environmental stress. In order to develop the platform technology to solve the global food and environmental problems in the 21st century, we focus on the understanding of the antioxidative mechanism in plant cells, the development of oxidative stress-inducible antioxidant genes, and the development of transgenic plants with enhanced tolerance to stress. In this report, we describe our recent results on industrial transgenic plants by the gene manipulation of antioxidant enzymes. Transgenic tobacco plants expressing both superoxide dismutase (SOD) and ascorbate peroxidase (APX) in chloroplasts were developed and were evaluated their protection effects against stresses, suggesting that simultaneous overexpression of both SOD and APX in chloroplasts has synergistic effects to overcome the oxidative stress under unfavorable environments. Transgenic tobacco plants expressing a human dehydroascorbate reductase gene in chloroplasts were showed the protection against the oxidative stress in plants. Transgenic cucumber plants expressing high level of SOD in fruits were successfully generated to use the functional cosmetic purpose as a plant bioreactor. In addition, we developed a strong oxidative stress-inducible peroxidase promoter, SWPA2 from sweetpotato (lpomoea batatas). We anticipate that SWPA2 promoter will be biotechnologically useful for the development of transgenic plants with enhanced tolerance to environmental stress and particularly transgenic cell lines engineered to produce key pharmaceutical proteins.