Considering the world’s growing population and less land being available for farming, it’s becoming more important than ever to increase nutritional quality and crop yield of food crops. One way to achieve this is by genetically modifying a plant by introducing a foreign gene (called a transgene) from another organism, essentially giving the plant a new trait not naturally present in its genome.
This often enhances a plant’s resistance to pests, diseases and environmental stresses, improves its nutritional value. Plant’s traits can also be improved by modifying the genes they already have through gene-editing technology.
However, when foreign genes are introduced into target crops using the transgenic approach or by manipulating endogenous gene expression in target crops using genome editing for trait modification, some unneeded DNA may end up permanently residing in the host genomes of the final transgenic products, which raises questions of potential hazards or adverse effects to the host, environment and human health. Professor Hong Luo and his lab have been studying this genome editing in crops.
“The unnecessary DNA that gets into the transgenic plants with the target gene need to be removed,” says professor Hong Luo.
One way to remove them is by using site-specific DNA recombinases. Site-specific recombinases recognize specific DNA sequences by flanking the desirable gene with target sequences that the recombinase can recognize and excise.
Professor Luo has received a $650,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study these unintended consequences of three site-specific DNA recombination systems commonly used to genetically engineer target crops.
In this study, Luo will study three different recombinase genes — Cre, FLP and PhiC31 — in plants creeping bentgrass and Arabidopsis by investigating whether there are unintended off-target effects to host genomes, epigenomes and phenotypes and whether they negatively or positively affect plant traits and present hazards to the environment.
“This will give us an idea about what aspects those recombinases impact in which particular plant species,” he said.
Read more and watch the video in the Clemson News article.
