Sporamin, the tuberous root storage protein of the sweet potato, accounts for about 60 to 80% of the total soluble protein of this organ. The amount of sporamin present in other organs is very low, or even not detectable, in the normal field-grown plants. However, the stem of sweet potato plantlets grown axenically on agar medium containing sucrose was found to accumulate large amounts of sporamin. Two-dimensional gel electrophoretic profiles of sporamin precursors synthesized in vitro by poly(A)+ RNA are indistinguishable between tuberous roots of the field-grown plants and stems of the axenically cultured plants, suggesting that an essentially identical set of the members of sporamin multigene family are expressed in these two organs under different growth conditions. Transgenic tobacco plants having a CAT (chloramphenicol acetyltransferase) fusion gene with the 5' upstream region of a sporamin A gene, gSPO-A1, show preferential expression of CAT activity in stems when the plants are maintained in axenic culture on sucrose medium as is the case for sporamin in sweet potato. Deletion analysis revealed that the DNA sequence of gSPO-A1 between -94 and -305, relative to the transcription start site, is important for its expression in tobacco. This region contains two of the previously postulated putative regulatory elements conserved between sporamin A and B genes.