What kind of plant is this?

Genetic engineering: plants: What kind of cost is there in the overall engineering of a plant to a new gene?

• Sort of, as in: a person has icome up a specimen of a certain type of plant, let's say in a heavily grown commmercial berry, that has (his specimen has) an outstanding trait, let's say, resistance to a disease that type of berry gets....And decisions are made to take on a project to identify the trait's gene, capture it and ready it for , presumably , injecting (gene injection, I think the term is) it into various cultivars of this type of commercial berry. What kind of costs, ball park figure maybe, would be apt to be involved in those overall latter processes, the determining of the gene and the getting ready of the gene for injecting? I'm assuming that the final process, the actual final injecting of the gene into plant cultivars to create resistant plant cultivars, isn't itself very expensive, now that the injection 'guns" have been invented; course, maybe I'm wrong and maybe that is big enough to need to be factored in to the overall cost of this kind of R & D project...

• Answer:

  Depends. If the gene is already known, and the method to cultivate tissue from the plant is established, then it would be quite cheap--you could do it in a high-school lab. If you need to identify the mutation, and figure out how to cultivate that particular plant tissue type, then it could be around $1,000,000 or so (I'm guessing).