Strategies for improving the nutritional quality of Phaseolus beans through gene engineering

Abstract

Although Phaseolus species are still difficult to transform, progress in this field now opens the way to engineering beans with a higher nutritional value. The opportunities for gene engineering in nutritional quality improvement, the strategies which canbe adopted and the constraints we are still facing are briefly outlined, using the enhancement of the seed methionine content and the reduction in antinutritional factors as examples.

Keywords

• phaseolus
• kidney-beans
• nutritive-value
• plant-breeding
• breeding-methods
• genetic-engineering
• genetic-transformation
• methionine
• oligosaccharides
• amino-acids
• carbohydrates
• leguminosae
• papilionoideae
• plant-products
• quality
• sulphur-amino-acids
• vegetables