Plant biotechnology will increase in importance in securing food and feed supply and in providing novel uses of plant-derived material, e.g. in energy production or for chemical industry. In addition, it will make full use of the wealth of knowledge generated by current and future genome research. Plant breeding will shift more and more to approaches based on the production of transgenic plants, a technology nowadays well established for all major crop plants. This technology ensures fast and efficient translation of knowledge into application and will be useful to improve numerous traits, e.g. abiotic and biotic stress tolerance or yield potential. However, a major disadvantage of current methodology is the lack of control over the position of integration of a transgene into the genome. As a consequence, a large number of transformants needs to be generated to obtain the elite events that fulfil the criteria for commercialisation and deregulation. Because of this, the generation of commercially useful transgenic plants is a time and labour-intensive process that causes enormous production costs, especially in crop plants like sugar beet. Therefore the availability of a technology enabling the integration of a transgene at predetermined positions in the genome would be a considerable advantage.

The main objective of the project is to establish a platform for insertion of transgenes at predefined loci in sugar beet using gene targeting technology. This platform will built the basis for the future breeding strategies of the industrial partner and help to reduce the production costs of transgenic sugar beet thus contributing to the competitiveness of this important German crop. The platform is based on zinc-finger nuclease (ZFN) technology for double strand break induction, a new and promising approach to stimulate homology-directed DNA integration in plants. However, the efficiencies obtained with ZFNs are not always as high as desired. In addition, the technology is expensive and access is restricted. Therefore, another objective is the further improvement of this technology and the development of alternatives which offer novel IP. This part includes strategies based on the elimination of activities destabilising an important intermediate in gene targeting, heterologous expression of recombination proteins with potential to stimulate gene targeting, and the development of alternative tools for targeted double-strand break induction.