title: Herbicide-resistance conferred by expression of a catalytic antibody in Arabidopsis thaliana.
abstract: Engineering herbicide resistance in crops facilitates control of weed species, particularly those that are closely related to the crop, and may be useful in selecting lines that have undergone multiple transformation events. Here we show that herbicide-resistant plants can be engineered by designing an herbicide and expressing a catalytic antibody that destroys the herbicide in planta. First, we developed a carbamate herbicide that can be catalytically destroyed by the aldolase antibody 38C2. This compound has herbicidal activity on all three plant species tested. Second, the light chain and half of the heavy chain (Fab) of the catalytic antibody were targeted to the endoplasmic reticulum in two classes of Arabidopsis thaliana transformants. Third, the two transgenic plants were crossed to produce an herbicide-resistant F1 hybrid. The in vitro catalytic activity of the protein from F1 hybrids corroborates that catalytic antibodies can be constitutively expressed in transgenic plants, and that they can confer a unique trait.
authors.affiliation: The Institute of Plant Sciences and Genetics in Agriculture and the Otto Warburg Minerva Center for Agricultural Biotechnology, Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Quality Sciences, The Hebrew University, Rehovot, Israel.
authors.forename: Yael
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Weiss
authors.forename: Avidor
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Shulman
authors.forename: Irina
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Ben Shir
authors.forename: Ehud
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Keinan
authors.forename: Shmuel
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wolf
mesh_terms: D017360:Arabidopsis / Q000187:drug effects / Q000502:physiology*; D002384:Catalysis; D005634:Fructose-Bisphosphate Aldolase / Q000235:genetics* / Q000276:immunology*; D006540:Herbicides / Q000494:pharmacology*; D007140:Immunoglobulin Fab Fragments / Q000235:genetics* / Q000276:immunology*; D030821:Plants, Genetically Modified / Q000187:drug effects* / Q000502:physiology*; D015202:Protein Engineering / Q000379:methods*; D011994:Recombinant Proteins / Q000378:metabolism
chemical_list: D006540:Herbicides; D007140:Immunoglobulin Fab Fragments; D011994:Recombinant Proteins; C109536:antibody aldolase; D005634:Fructose-Bisphosphate Aldolase