Provided are methods of increasing yield, biomass, growth rate, vigor, and/or abiotic stress tolerance of a plant by expressing within the plant an exogenous polynucleotide comprising a nucleic acid sequence at least 80% identical to SEQ ID NO: 84 or 921; or an exogenous polynucleotide encoding a polypeptide at least 80% identical to SEQ ID NO: 188.

Provided are methods, vectors and gene constructs for enhancing expression of a recombinant nucleic acid sequence in transgenic plants and plant tissues. According to the present invention, nucleic acid sequences are obtained and/or derived from the 3 untranslated regions of Zea mays chlorophyll a/b binding protein gene and engineered to flank respective portions of a selected coding region of a vector. The vector construct may be introduced into plants and/or plant tissues through conventional or gene targeting procedures, resulting in enhanced expression of the selected coding region. In some embodiments, the selected coding region is a chimeric gene or gene fragment expressing one or more proteins known to impart a level of insecticidal activity to a transgenic plant and/or plant tissue.

The present invention provides for soybean plant and seed comprising transformation event MON89788 and DNA molecules unique to these events. The invention also provides methods for detecting the presence of these DNA molecules in a sample.

This invention relates to an artificial salt tolerant protein NLEA with the amino acid sequence shown in SEQ ID No.1 and a synthetic method of salt tolerant protein NLEA comprising the steps of retrieving different types of LEA proteins from LEA database; making multiple sequence alignment on different types of LEA proteins to obtain conserved short peptides; selecting hydrophilic short peptides with a hydrophilicity index higher than 3.5 from conserved short peptides; arranging and splicing hydrophilic short peptides in the order of isoelectric point size from large to small, to obtain salt tolerant protein NLEA. This invention involves bioinformatics analysis by retrieving different LEA conserved amino acid sequences of LEA protein data. Physical properties are analyzed to find short peptides of high hydrophilicity, and such short peptides are arranged in the order of isoelectric point size and spliced to get a new hydrophilic amino acid sequence.

The present invention provides for soybean plant and seed comprising transformation event MON89788 and DNA molecules unique to these events. The invention also provides methods for detecting the presence of these DNA molecules in a sample.

The present invention relates to a method of improving soybean transformation efficiency, which comprises: transforming a plant cell using a recombinant vector containing a gene of interest and a gene encoding a sulfonylurea herbicide hydrolase; screening and culturing the transformed plant cell by external application of an ALS inhibitor, using the gene encoding the sulfonylurea herbicide hydrolase as a selective marker; selecting a plant cell that has not been killed and/or not been inhibited. The present invention firstly proposes that a selective agent is added to a proliferation medium and a differentiation medium in a manner of external application during plant transformation process, and optimizes the effective screening concentration range of the selective agent, so the transformation efficiency is remarkably increased, and the proportion of positive plants obtained in the progeny thereof is significantly increased; at the same time, the transgenic plants obtained by the transformation using the sulfonylurea herbicide hydrolase gene as a selective marker in the present invention have high commercial value, good resistance and genetic stability.

Methods of, and compositions for, assembling one or more transcription units in a genome without a linked selectable marker or other unwanted transcription unit are provided. Also provided methods of, and compositions for, assembling one or more transcription units in a genome with a reduced frequency of vector backbone.

The invention provides methods and compositions for identifying transgenic seed that contain a transgene of interest, but lack a marker gene. Use of an identification sequence that results in a detectable phenotype increases the efficiency of screening for seed and plants in which transgene sequences not linked to a gene of interest have segregated from the sequence encoding a gene of interest.

The present invention is drawn to compositions and methods for improving transformation frequency. The compositions, synthetic selectable marker genes, are used in transformation methods and result in increased transformation frequency.

The present invention relates to a lettuce plant, with a modified LsKO2 and/or Ls20ox1-B gene, wherein the homozygous presence of said genes leads to a shade tolerant phenotype, the wild-type LsKO2 gene and the wild-type Ls20ox1-B gene can have a coding sequence having at least 70% sequence identity to SEQ ID NO.: 9 and SEQ ID NO.: 11, respectively. The modification involves replacement and/or deletion and/or insertion of nucleotides resulting in an absence of functional KO2 and/or GA20ox1-B protein or the modification results in the absence of the wild-type LsKO2 and/or Ls20ox1-B gene. The homozygous presence of one or both of the modified LsKO2 and Ls20ox1-B genes or the homozygous absence of one or both of the wild-type LsKO2 and/or Ls20ox1-B genes in the plant confers shade tolerance as compared to a plant with the wild-type LsKO2 and Ls20ox1-B gene and not showing shade tolerance.