Dr. Nessler is working on the major latex protein of opium poppy in transgenic tobacco plants in order to provide information as to how hybrid proteins can be specifically targeted to cellular compartments. The poppy laticifer cell type has the ability to synthesize medicinally important alkaloids, therefore understanding the protein targeting mechanism will help to elucidate the regulation of secondary products in plant metabolism. Mr. Wooten plans to learn to engineer gene constructs and to transfer them to vectors. He will, also develop techniques for transforming plants with chimeric gene constructs and use immunocytochemical techniques to localize chimeric proteins in transgenic plants.
