Transcriptome analysis reveals absence of unintended effects in drought-tolerant transgenic plants overexpressing the transcription factor <it>ABF3</it>

• Main Authors: Schnell Jaimie, Abdeen Ashraf, Miki Brian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: BMC 2010-01-01
• Series: BMC Genomics
• Online Access: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/11/69

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Plants engineered for abiotic stress tolerance may soon be commercialized. The engineering of these plants typically involves the manipulation of complex multigene networks and may therefore have a greater potential to introduce pleiotropic effects than the simple monogenic traits that currently dominate the plant biotechnology market. While research on unintended effects in transgenic plant systems has been instrumental in demonstrating the substantial equivalence of many transgenic plant systems, it is essential that such analyses be extended to transgenic plants engineered for stress tolerance. Drought-tolerant <it>Arabidopsis thaliana </it>were engineered through overexpression of the transcription factor <it>ABF3 </it>in order to investigate unintended pleiotropic effects. In order to eliminate position effects, the Cre/<it>lox </it>recombination system was used to create control plant lines that contain identical T-DNA insertion sites but with the <it>ABF3 </it>transgene excised. This additionally allowed us to determine if Cre recombinase can cause unintended effects that impact the transcriptome.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Microarray analysis of control plant lines that underwent Cre-mediated excision of the <it>ABF3 </it>transgene revealed only two genes that were differentially expressed in more than one plant line, suggesting that the impact of Cre recombinase on the transcriptome was minimal. In the absence of drought stress, overexpression of <it>ABF3 </it>had no effect on the transcriptome, but following drought stress, differences were observed in the gene expression patterns of plants overexpressing <it>ABF3 </it>relative to control plants. Examination of the functional distribution of the differentially expressed genes revealed strong similarity indicating that unintended pathways were not activated.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The action of ABF3 is tightly controlled in <it>Arabidopsis</it>. In the absence of drought stress, ectopic activation of drought response pathways does not occur. In response to drought stress, overexpression of <it>ABF3 </it>results in a reprogramming of the drought response, which is characterized by changes in the timing or strength of expression of some drought response genes, without activating any unexpected gene networks. These results illustrate that important gene networks are highly regulated in <it>Arabidopsis </it>and that engineering stress tolerance may not necessarily cause extensive changes to the transcriptome.</p>