DNA technology?

Question

"Scientists have now cloned the genes found in the bacteria species Deinococcus that shield it from radiation & through recombinant DNA technology, have placed them in tomato plant cells."

is this possible? if so, how?

Answer 1

Simple, take the snippet of DNA, place it in a viral carrier common to tomato plants, and infect them. Viola! You have now spliced a gene into your plant.
This is how they use E. coli (a bacteria) to make insulin (a human hormone)

Answer 2

It is possible to place any DNA fragment from any organism into another one. Whether or not that piece of DNA functions, on the other hand is an entirely different question, and there are success and failure stories for many. However, they have put human genes, insect genes, and fish genes in plants as well as many other bacterial genes, so this is not surprising in the least. What they typically do is isolate the DNA from the bacterium, in this case Deinococcus, grab the desired piece by chopping up the DNA and cloning the pieces into vectors (little circular, other pieces of DNA), identify the right one by hybridizing all of them to radioactive pieces of the DNA sequence you are looking for, see which one lights up, and then propagate the vectors by growing a bunch of them up in another type of bacteria. Then they isolate those vectors and either modify them for plants or put the fragment in a new vector designed especially for tomato. Then they take a gun-like device, (or they use a virus, or another bacterium to infect the tomato plant) and bombard the cells with mini-particles coated with the vectors, and then the tomato plant cells contain the DNA of interest.