Department of Plant Biotechnology CPMB&B, TNAU, Coimbatore-641 003 MBB 691 (0+1) Chairman Student Dr. V.

Udayasuriyan Murlidhar S Professor, DPB No: 11-608-001 (II Ph.D) Course Teacher Dr. S. Krishnaveni Prof. & Head, DPB Jadhav ID. Credit seminar

Transgene integration, organization and interaction in plants Abstract In 2011, over 160 million ha of transgenic crops were grown commercially in 29 countries, the most prevalent traits being herbicide tolerance, pest resistance, or both traits stacked together. Despite the focus on phenotype, over last decade there has been an increasing interest in creating transgenic plants to study the process of gene transfer itself (Kohli et al., 2003). It has been found that the structure of a transgene locus can have a major influence on the level and stability of transgene expression. To have a predictable level of transgene expression, studies on DNA integration mechanisms, organization, are very important particularly with regard to how transgene interact with the plant genome and environment (Kohli et al., 2010). Gene transfer to plant were mostly achieved by Agrobacterium mediated transformation and Particle bombardment methods. For both methods of DNA integration, different models have been proposed but increasing evidence suggests that Agrobacterium utilizes the host double strand break (DSB) repair machinery to facilitate T-DNA integration (Magori and Citovsky, 2011). Generally it has been found that DNA integration occurs more randomly through illegitimate recombination (NHEJ) and leads formation of simple to complex loci. Recently, Singer et al., (2012) showed that T-DNA undergoes various types of rearrangement in plant cell before transgene integration into the host genome. Transgene interaction possibly depends on locus structure/organization. Interaction may be allelic or non allelic (epistatic) that leads to non-Mendelian inheritance and variation in the level of transgene expression (Nap et al., 1997). In certain cases transgene may leads to changes gene expression profile of the host genes involved in energy metabolism (Ren et al., 2009). Thus studying transgene integration, structure and interaction is very important to breed and predict transgenic plants with stable and desirable level transgene expression and plants which free from unintended effect. References
Kohli A., B. Miro, and R. M. Twyman. 2010. Transgene integration, expression and stability in plants: Strategies for improvements. C. Kole et al. (eds.), Transgenic Crop Plants, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg Kohli A., Twyman R. M., A. Abranches, E. Wegel, P. Shaw, P. Christou, E. Stoger. 2003. Transgene integration, organization and interaction in plants. Plant Molecular Biology 52:247258

Magori S. and V. Citovsky. 2011. Epigenetic control of Agrobacterium T-DNA integration. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta 1809: 388394 Nap J., A. Canner, L. Mlynarova, W. Stiekema and R. Jansent. 1997. Dissection of a synthesized quantitative trait to characterize transgene interactions. Genetics 147: 315-320 Singer K., Yoel, J. Li and T. Tzfira. 2012. Formation of complex extrachromosomal T-DNA structures in Agrobacterium tumefaciens-infected plants. Plant physiology 109: 511522 Ren Y., J. Lv, H. Wang, L. Li, Y. Peng, L. Qu. 2009. A comparative proteomics approach to detect unintended effects in transgenic Arabidopsis. Journal of Genetics and Genomics 36: 629-639