Figure 1

Chloroplast transformation in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii . a) Introduction of foreign DNA material into the chloroplast of C. reinhardtii is carried out using a particle bombardment device. The device uses helium gas to accelerate particles towards algae placed at the interior of a vacuum chamber. b) Gold or tungsten particles are coated with a plasmid carrying the genes of interest (in this case the green fluorescence protein GFP) and when accelerated penetrate the cells placed on top of selection medium. After a few weeks, transformed cells proliferate in the presence of a selection antibiotic. c) When the plasmid carrying the genes reaches de chloroplast, genes integrate into the plastid genome by homologous recombination between regions present in the plasmid (LB and RB) and in the chloroplast genome (CpDNA).