1st. what is transgenic plant?
Most people already know that all the organisms including microorganisms, human beings, plants and animals have quite similar basic substance DNA, the scientific name of the DNA is Deoxyribonucleic acid. Gene which plays the essential role for life is composed of DNA. As for the plants, they share same DNA compositions in the nuclear as animal or human beings, while in the chloroplast and mitochondria they share quite similar DNA as microorganisms. We know that different organisms have quite different abilities, for example, the fish live in arctic area can survive in the very cold sea water, while the strawberry in the greenhouse could only stay in warm temperature, all these features are controlled by genes. Therefore, at the early stage, scientist start to think is it possible that introduce the cold feature to strawberry, so that we can have new species that cold-tolerance. In the ancient time, it was only a dream, because the traditional methods for breeding is cross, limited between species. However, with the development of biotechnology, we could identify the gene that responsible for cold tolerance in fish, and introduce this gene into the genome of strawberry, then the strawberry containing fish gene can be regarded as transgenic plant. Theoretically , the compositions in the new species do not changed, still DNA; while the new genome have the ability to make the new strawberry stronger.