Background

Nowadays, as the more and more use of herbicide, lots of problems have come up. Some of these problems are very serious such as the poisonous residue of herbicide and the superweed which have the resistance to the herbicide. What's more,as the students of China Agriculture University, we would like to use what we have learned to make a little improvement in the agriculture industry.

Content

Overall project summary

How did we come up with it?

Firstly, we found that the abuse of herbicide causes a lot of serious problems and the mix use of herbicides can decrease the dose, increase the efficacy, decrease the poison residual and expand the weed control spectrum. Therefore we want to create the transgenic plants which have the resistant to two kinds of herbicides so that when farmers use two kinds of herbicides to kill weeds, the crops will not be affected.

Our achievement

In our project, we create 4 kinds of transgenic plants. All of them have the resistant to two kinds of herbicides. We use the foot-and-mouth disease virus 2A polyprotein to link to two different resistant genes. In the modeling part, we try to use computer modeling to predict which kind of protein can be linked with 2A and the how the 2A polypeptide affects the protein's function.

Fig.1 T0 generation seed

Fig.2 T1 generation seed. 60μM Glyphosate + 5 mg/L PPT. GAB & BAG

Fig.3 T1 generation seed. 2 mg/L 2，4-D+5 mg/L basta. BAT

Fig.4 T1 generation seed. 2 mg/L 2，4-D+5 mg/L basta. TAB

We want to do more

Bio safety

We have plans to make further modifications to the system, adding a toxic gene in between the two target genes in case of super weed caused by genetic drift. And the application of this vector is restrained within the crops that won't be disturbed by the toxin. In our bettered system, only one herbicide gene is at the risk of drifting because if more genes were to drift into another species, it would definitely include the toxic gene and disrupt the normal life of weeds and thus can't live. The genetic drift rate of each gene is at the end of the day very low, and present prevention methods are proven to be efficient. With our modification, this problem is kept at a even smaller scale.

"Super Crop"

We aims to create a kind of crop that is resistant to different kinds of stress and having other good qualities. Bacillus thuringiensis Crystal (Cry) and Cytolitic (Cyt) protein families are a diverse group of proteins with activity against insects of different orders. Co-expressing different pesticidal protein in crops using 2A can help create insect-resistant crops.

Also transimitting the LEA protein family can improve the cold-resistant ability of plants. SOS 1,2,3 cooperate to regulate ion homeostasis under salt stress. SOS family is also under consideration to resist salt stress. We also want to transform the metabolic pathways. C4 photosynthesis is a series of anatomical and biochemical modifications to the typical C3 pathway that increases the productivity of plants in warm, sunny, and dry conditions. Co-expressing key enzyme of C4 plant in C3 plant may help to modify the classical C3 pathway.

References

［1］ Dill GM, Cajacob CA, Padgette SR. Glyphosate-resistant crops ：adoption, use and future considerations. Pest Manag Sci, 2008, 64（4）:326-331.

［2］Abdelhak El Amrani, Abdellah Barakate, Barak M. Askari, Xuejun Li, Alison G. Roberts,Martin D. Ryan, and Claire HalpinCoordinate Expression and Independent Subcellular Targeting of Multiple Proteins from a Single Transgene. Plant Physiology, May 2004, Vol. 135, pp. 16–24,