Journal Article
The application of the ‘Gene-deletor’ technology in banana
Chun-hua Hu; Qiao-song Yang; Xiu-hong Shao; Tao Dong; Fang-cheng Bi; Chun-yu Li; Gui-ming Deng; Yi Li; Gan-jun Yi; Tong-xin Dou
Plant Cell, Tissue and Organ Culture (PCTOC) · Vol. 140, Issue 1 · pp. 105-114 · 2020
Abstract
Banana ( Musa spp.) is an important tropical crop. Banana industry is under biotic and abiotic stresses such as Fusarium wilt, typhoon, cold stress. Genetic engineering offers a powerful strategy to create germplasm of banana with enhanced resistance. The safety of genetically modified organisms has become a bottleneck restricting the popularization and application of genetically modified technology. In this study, a candidate promoter, LEAFY (LFY) for expression and flower initiation in Arabidopsis , was cloned and constructed to ‘Gene-deletor’ vector. Histochemical β-glucuronidase (GUS) staining results showed that the ‘Gene-deletor’ vector driven by LFY promoter could lead to 88.5% excision efficiency from Arabidopsis seeds based on more than 200 T 3 progeny examined per event. GUS staining was found to be partially negative in transgenic bananas, however, polymerase chain reaction could still detect the presence of large fragments of the vector. These results suggest that although LFY promoter could not completely drive the ‘Gene-deletor’ vector to achieve the effect of complete elimination of exogenous gene in bananas, its efficiency of eliminating exogenous gene laid a theoretical foundation for cloning banana fruit-specific promoters, that is, ‘non-transgenic’ GM bananas.