Biosafety assessment of GFP transplastomic tobacco to rhizosphere microbial community

• Published in: Ecotoxicology (London) Vol. 23; no. 4; pp. 718 - 725
• Main Authors: Lv, Yueping, Cai, Hongsheng, Yu, Jianping, Liu, Jiali, Liu, Qingguo, Guo, Changhong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer-Verlag 01.05.2014; Springer US; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Biosafety; Biotechnology; Chemical analysis; Chloroplasts; Communities; Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis; Developmental stages; Earth and Environmental Science; Ecology; Ecosystem assessment; Ecotoxicology; Ecotypes; Environment; Environmental indicators; Environmental Management; Environmental risk; Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid; flowering; Fluorescence; Genetic engineering; Genetically modified organisms; green fluorescent protein; Green Fluorescent Proteins - genetics; Green Fluorescent Proteins - toxicity; microbial communities; Microbial Consortia - drug effects; Microorganisms; Nicotiana; Nicotiana tabacum; Plants (organisms); Plants, Genetically Modified - toxicity; Polymerase Chain Reaction; Principal Component Analysis; Proteins; reporter genes; Rhizosphere; Risk Assessment; Seedlings; Soil Microbiology; Tobacco; Transformations; transgenes; GFP; Tobacco; Biolog Eco; Rhizosphere microbial community; PCR-DGGE; ); Chloroplast genetic engineering
• ISSN: 0963-9292; 1573-3017
• DOI: 10.1007/s10646-014-1185-y

Green fluorescent protein (GFP) is one of the most widely studied and exploited proteins in biochemistry, and has many applications as a marker, especially in plant transformation system. Although a number of studies have been conducted to assess the toxify of this protein to specific organisms, little is known about GFP on rhizosphere microbial community, which is regarded as good indicator for environmental risk assessment. Chloroplast genetic engineering has shown superiority over traditional nuclear genetic engineering, and has been used in many aspects of plant genetic engineering. High levels of chloroplast-based protein accumulation make this technology as an ideal strategy to evaluate biosafety of transgenes. In the present study, the effects of field-released GFP transplastomic tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) on rhizosphere microbes over a whole growth cycle were investigated by using both culture-dependent and culture-independent methods. Compared to wild-type control, transplastomic tobacco had no significant influence on the microbial population at the seedling, vegetative, flowering and senescing stages. However, developmental stages had more influence than ecotypes (GFP-transformed and wild-type). This was confirmed by colony forming unit, Biolog Ecoᵀᴹ and PCR-DGGE analysis. Thus, these results suggest chloroplast transformation with a GFP reporter gene has no significant influence on rhizosphere microbial community, and will be potential platform for plant biotechnology in future.