Figure 3.

Analysis of lycopene β-cyclase mRNA accumulation in leaves (A) and ripe fruits (B) of transplastomic tomato plants. Total cellular RNA was hybridized to radiolabeled probes corresponding to the coding regions of crtY or Lyc. With each probe, two major transcript species are detected. While the bottom band represents mature monocistronic lycopene β-cyclase mRNA (1.3 kb for crtY and 1.7 kb for Lyc), the top band most probably represents a stable read-through transcript, as has been observed before with pKP9-derived vectors (Zhou et al., 2008; Oey et al., 2009). Sizes of marker bands are indicated in kb. Note that crtY and Lyc do not cross-hybridize due to insufficient sequence similarity (Fig. 1D). wt, Wild type.