Simultaneous co-suppression of polygalacturonase and pectinesterase in tomato fruit: inheritance and effect on isoform profiles

The simultaneous down regulation of two, or more, genes can be brought about by the transformation of a plant with a single chimeric transgene containing homologous sequences to both target genes. This has been achieved for the two cell wall hydrolases — polygalacturonase and pectinesterase — in tomato fruit. This paper reports the stable inheritance of this co-ordinated gene silencing over two generations. It has also been shown that only two of the three isoforms of pectinesterase in the tomato fruit are silenced by this chimeric construct thus providing some indication of the relative homologies between the gene sequences for these isoforms.