ABSTRACT
The opium poppy, like many other important crop species, has provided a number of technical challenges for the application of modern molecular approaches. These difficulties include, but are not limited to, problems in protein and nucleic acid purification, as well as the transformation and regeneration of fertile plants. Over the past decade most of these barriers have been overcome so that the opium poppy is poised to become a model system for the study of latex cell gene regulation as well as a target for metabolic engineering of important pharmaceuticals.
