Growth, weight and starch content
The up-regulation of any functionally indispensable gene product(s)
usually results in alterations in the development of the plant. We
compared the overall growth of VC, CAx3 and CAx5 plants, all for 3-week
old plants. The CAx3 and CAx5 plants had longer (~14%)
roots than that of VC (Table 3). However, their shoot lengths
were almost similar (Table 3) . The CAx3 and CAx5 plants had
bigger (11%-15%) rosette diameter than the VC plants (Table
3) . After 3 weeks of growth, the dry weight of CAx3 and CAx5 plants
increased by 14%, and 20%, respectively than that in VC (Fig.
7b) . Furthermore, increased photosynthetic carbon assimilation in the
transgenics resulted in higher starch content (10-19%), estimated
before the end of the day (Fig. 7c) .