title: Biosafety assessment of GFP transplastomic tobacco to rhizosphere microbial community.
abstract: 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 Eco(TM) 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.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Molecular and Cytogenetics, College of Life Science and Technology, Harbin Normal University, Harbin, 150025, Heilongjiang, China.
authors.forename: Yueping
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Lv
authors.forename: Hongsheng
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Cai
authors.forename: Jianping
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.forename: Jiali
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Qingguo
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Changhong
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Guo
mesh_terms: D058645:Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis; D049452:Green Fluorescent Proteins / Q000235:genetics / Q000633:toxicity*; D059013:Microbial Consortia / Q000187:drug effects*; D030821:Plants, Genetically Modified / Q000633:toxicity*; D016133:Polymerase Chain Reaction; D025341:Principal Component Analysis; D018570:Risk Assessment; D012988:Soil Microbiology; D014026:Nicotiana
chemical_list: D049452:Green Fluorescent Proteins