An objective of the present invention is to provide a promoter from the
rice 10 kDa Prolaminin gene having seed-specific promoter activity, and
methods of expressing foreign proteins in seeds. The present inventors
isolated the promoters of a number of genes that are expressed in rice
seeds, constructed binary vectors in which each promoter is inserted
upstream of the GUS reporter gene, and transformed rice using the
Agrobacterium method. The inventors then used GUS expression level as an
index to examine the site of expression, the expression pattern during
seed maturation, and the level of expression in seeds for each promoter.
They thus discovered promoters with activity specific to a particular
site in seeds, and with higher activity than constitutive promoters and
known seed-specific promoters.