Japan invents new technology for selecting transgenic plants

Three agricultural technology research institutes such as the Japan Central Agricultural Research Center have jointly invented a new technology that uses transgenic rice plants to contain genetically modified genes.
In the past, to cultivate transgenic plants, a gene resistant to antibiotics such as kanamycin was used together with a target gene to determine if other genes were implanted by observing whether the target gene could survive in the presence of antibiotics. However, most of these genes that are resistant to antibiotics are extracted from bacteria. If they are spread out, they may cause harm to the environment, and consumers have a resistance to these genes, so this method is not ideal.
According to the report of the "Japan Industry News", the new method developed by the research team is to use the mutant acetolactate synthase gene extracted from rice to select transgenic plants. This gene is a mutant gene obtained by replacing two amino acids contained in rice itself, and experiments have proved that the use of this gene for transgenic plant selection is as effective as the previous method.