Chimeric gene comprising the arabidopsis histone H4 promoter for the transformation of plants

A chimetic gene for conferring increased plant tolerance to glyphosate comprising in the 5' to 3' direction:

• (a) a promoter region selected from the group consisting of a 530 bp HindIII-NdeI fragment of an Arabidopsis thaliana clone H4 A777 histone H4 promoter positioned directly upstream of two tandemly repeated copies of a 330 bp NdeI-EcoRV fragment of the H4 A777 histone H4 promoter positioned directly upstream of a 140 bp EcoRV-Eco RI fragment of the H4 A777 histone H4 promoter, and a double CaMV 35S promoter derived from a pRPA-BL 410 clone positioned directly upstream of a histone H4 promoter revived from an Arabidopsis thaliana H4 A748 clone;
• (b) a nucleic acid sequence encoding a chloroplast transit peptide (CTP) region selected from the group consisting of
• (i) the CTP from a maize RuBisCo SSU gene,
• (ii) the CTP and 23 amino acids of the amino terminal region of the mature protein from the maize RuBisCO SSU gene,
• (iii) the CTP from a sunflower RuBisCO SSU gene,
• (iv) the CTP from the sunflower SSU gene positioned directly upstream of the first 23 amino acids of the mature maize RuBisCO SSU protein;
• and
• (v) the CTP from the sunflower RuBisCO SSU gene, positioned directly upstream of the first 23 amino acids of the mature maize RuBisCO SSU protein positioned directly upstream of the chloroplast transit peptide from the maize RuBisCO SSU gene;
• (c) a coding sequence for 5-(enoylpyruval)shikimate-3-phosphate synthase;
• and
• (d) a polyadenylation signal sequence.