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Biosafety assessment of GFP transplastomic tobacco to rhizosphere microbial community

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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 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.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 30970552), and Aid program for Science and Technology Innovative Research Team in Higher Educational Institutions of Heilongjiang Province (2010TD10) and Harbin Normal University (KJTD2011-2).

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Molecular and Cytogenetics, College of Life Science and Technology, Harbin Normal University, Harbin, 150025, Heilongjiang, China

    Yueping Lv, Hongsheng Cai, Jianping Yu, Jiali Liu, Qingguo Liu & Changhong Guo

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  1. Yueping Lv
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  2. Hongsheng Cai
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  3. Jianping Yu
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  4. Jiali Liu
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  5. Qingguo Liu
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  6. Changhong Guo
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Correspondence to Changhong Guo.

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Lv, Y., Cai, H., Yu, J. et al. Biosafety assessment of GFP transplastomic tobacco to rhizosphere microbial community. Ecotoxicology 23, 718–725 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10646-014-1185-y

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