Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-21T12:14:13.988Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Genetically engineered self-destruction: an alternative to herbicides for cover crop systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Marisha A. Stanislaus  and
Chi-Lien Cheng
Marisha A. Stanislaus
Affiliation:
Department of Biological Sciences, 312 CB, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The use of winter cover crops is beneficial to agriculture. We have tried to design a cover crop that self-destructs in response to an environmental cue, thereby eliminating the use of herbicides and tillage to remove the cover crop in late spring. Here, this novel concept is tested in a model system. The onset of summer brings with it elevated temperatures. Using this as the environmental cue, a self-destruction cassette was designed and tested in tobacco. A heat-shock–responsive promoter was used to direct expression of the ribonuclease Barnase. Because Barnase is extremely toxic to cells, it was necessary to coexpress its inhibitor, Barstar, whose expression was under the control of the CaMV 35S promoter. The wild-type and two mutated Barnase genes, one missense and one translation attenuated, were tested. Our results indicated that the translation-attenuated version of the Barnase gene was most effective in causing heat-shock–regulated plant death. Analysis of the T2 progeny of a transgenic plant carrying this Barnase mutant showed that the Barnase gene expression was sixfold higher in heat-shock–treated plants compared with untreated plants. This level of Barnase gene expression was sufficient to kill transgenic plants.

Keywords

Arabidopsis, Arabidopsis thalianaTobacco, Nicotiana tabacum (L.) cv. Petit Havana SR1Cover cropheat shockself-destruction cassette
Type
Research Article
Information
Weed Science , Volume 50 , Issue 6 , December 2002 , pp. 794 - 801
Copyright
Copyright © Weed Science Society of America 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Literature Cited

Bardwell, J. C. A., and Craig, E. A. 1984. Major heat shock gene of Drosophila and Escherichia coli heat-inducible dnaK genes are homologous. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 81:848–852.Google Scholar
Bevan, M. 1984. Binary Agrobacterium vectors for plant transformation. Nucleic Acids Res. 12:8711–8721.Google Scholar
Bruce, R. R., Wilkinson, S. R., and Langdale, G. W. 1987. Legume effects on soil erosion and productivity. Pages 127–138 In Power, J. F., ed. The Role of Legumes in Conservation Tillage Systems. Ankeny, IA: Soil and Water Conservation Society of America.Google Scholar
Cheng, C.-L., Acedo, G. N., Christin, M., and Conkling, M. A. 1992. Sucrose mimics the light induction of Arabidopsis nitrate reductase gene transcription. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 89:1861–1864.Google Scholar
Cheng, C.-L., Acedo, G. N., Dewdney, J., Goodman, H. M., and Conkling, M. A. 1991. Differential expression of the two Arabidopsis nitrate reductase genes. Plant Physiol. 96:275–279.Google Scholar
Dean, C., Jones, J., Favreau, M., Dunsmuir, P., and Bedbrook, J. 1988. Influences of flanking sequences on variability in expression levels of an introduced gene in transgenic tobacco plants. Nucleic Acids Res. 16:9267–9283.Google Scholar
Dinesh-Kumar, S. P. and Miller, W. A. 1993. Control of start codon choice on a plant viral RNA encoding overlapping genes. Plant Cell. 5:679–692.Google Scholar
Fiedler, A. G. and Peel, S. 1992. The selection management of species for cover cropping. Pages 283–290 In Aspects of Applied Biology 30, Nitrate and Farming Systems. Wellesbourne, Warwick: The Association of Applied Biologists.Google Scholar
Galloway, B. A. and Weston, L. A. 1996. Influence of cover crop and herbicide treatment on weed control and yield in no-till sweet corn (Zea mays L.) and pumpkin (Cucurbita maxima Duch.). Weed Technol. 10:341–346.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gyrley, W. B. and Key, J. L. 1991. Transcriptional regulation of the heat-shock response: a plant perpective. Biochemistry 30:1–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hargrove, W. L. and Frye, W. 1987. The need for legume cover crops in conservation tillage production. Pages 1–4 In Power, J. F., ed. The Role of Legumes in Conservation Tillage Systems. Ankeny, IA: Soil and Water Conservation Society of America.Google Scholar
Hartley, R. W. 1988. Barnase and Barstar: expression of its cloned inhibitor permits expression of a cloned ribonuclease. J. Mol. Biol. 202:913–915.Google Scholar
Hartley, R. W. and Smeaton, J. R. 1973. On the reaction between the extracellular ribonuclease of Bacillus amyloliquefaciens (barnase) and its intracellular inhibitor (barstar). J. Biol. Chem. 248:5624–5626.Google Scholar
Hobbs, S.L.A., Kpodar, P., and DeLong, C.M.O. 1990. The effect of T-DNA copy number, position and methylation on reporter gene expression in tobacco transformants. Plant Mol. Biol. 15:851–864.Google Scholar
Hoyt, G. D. 1987. Legumes as a green manure for conservation tillage. Pages 96–98 In Powers, J. F., ed. The Role of Legumes in Conservation Tillage Systems. Ankeny, IA: Soil and Water Conservation Society of America.Google Scholar
Hu, W. and Cheng, C.-L. 1995. Expression of Aequorea green fluorescent protein in plant cells. FEBS Lett. 369:331–334.Google Scholar
Hunt, C. and Morimoto, R. I. 1985. Conserved features of eukaryotic hsp70 genes revealed by comparison with the nucleotide sequence of human hsp70. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 82:6455–6459.Google Scholar
Jefferson, R. A., Burgess, S. M., and Hirsh, D. 1986. β-Glucuronidase from Escherichia coli as a gene-fusion marker. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 83:8447–8451.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jefferson, R. A., Kavanagh, T. A., and Bevan, M. W. 1987. GUS fusions: β-glucuronidase as a sensitive and versatile gene fusion marker in higher plants. EMBO J. 6:3901–3907.Google Scholar
Jones, J.D.G., Gilbert, D. E., Grady, K. L., and Jorgensen, R. A. 1987. T-DNA structure and gene expression in petunia plants transformed by Agrobacterium tumafaciens C58 derivatives. Mol. Gen. Genet. 207:478–485.Google Scholar
Jorgensen, R. 1992. Silencing of plant genes by homologous transgenes. AgBiotech News Inf. 4:265–273.Google Scholar
Key, J. L., Lin, C. Y., and Chen, Y. M. 1981. Heat shock proteins of higher plants. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 78:3526–3530.Google Scholar
Kilby, N. J., Leyser, H.M.O., and Furner, I. J. 1992. Promoter methylation and progressive transgene inactivation in Arabidopsis . Plant Mol. Biol. 20:103–112.Google Scholar
Kozak, M. 1986. Point mutations define a sequence flanking the AUG initiator codon that modulates translation by eukaryotic ribosomes. Cell 44:283–292.Google Scholar
Lindquist, S. 1986. The heat-shock response. Ann. Rev. Biochem. 55:1151–1191.Google Scholar
Matzke, A.J.M., Neuhuber, F., Park, Y.-D., Ambros, P. F., and Matzke, M. A. 1994. Homology-dependent gene silencing in transgenic plants: epistatic silencing loci contain multiple copies of methylated transgenes. Mol. Gen. Genet. 244:219–229.Google Scholar
Nover, L., Hellmund, D., Neumann, D., Scharf, K.-D., and Serfling, E. 1984. The heat-shock response of eukaryotic cells. Biol. Zentralbl. 103:357–453.Google Scholar
Olav, B. L. and Jan, N. 1999. Winter annual legumes for use as cover crops in row crops in northern regions: I. Field experiments. Crop Sci. 39:1369–1379.Google Scholar
Scheid, O. M., Paszkowski, J., and Potrykus, I. 1991. Reversible inactivation of a transgene in Arabidopsis thaliana . Mol. Gen. Genet. 228:104–112.Google Scholar
Schöffl, F., Baumann, G., Raschke, E., and Bevan, M. W. 1986. The expression of heat shock genes in higher plants. Philos. Trans. R Soc. Lond. B 314:453–468.Google Scholar
Schöffl, F., Rieping, M., Baumann, G., Bevan, M., and Angermuller, S. 1989. The function of plant heat shock promoter elements in the regulated expression of chimaeric genes in transgenic tobacco. Mol. Gen. Genet. 217:246–253.Google Scholar
Takahashi, T., Naito, S., and Komeda, Y. 1992. Isolation and analysis of the expression of two genes for the 81-kilodalton heat shock proteins from Arabidopsis . Plant Physiol. 99:338–390.Google Scholar
Teasdale, J. R. 1996. Contribution of cover crops to weed management in sustainable agricultural systems. J. Prod. Agric. 9:475–479.Google Scholar
Teasdale, J. R. and Shirley, D. W. 1998. Influence of herbicide application on corn production in a hairy vetch cover crop. J. Prod. Agric. 11:121–125.Google Scholar
Tebrügge, F. and Düring, R.-A. 1999. Reducing tillage intensity—a review of results from a long term study in Germany. Soil Tillage Res. 53:15–28.Google Scholar
Tyler, D. D., Wagger, M. G., McCracken, D. V., and Hargrove, W. L. 1994. Role of conservation tillage in sustainable agriculture in the southern United States. Pages 209–229 In Carter, M. R., ed. Conservation Tillage in Temperate Agroecosystems. Boca Raton, FL: Lewis.Google Scholar
Vierling, E. 1991. The roles of heat shock proteins in plants. Ann. Rev. Plant. Physiol. Plant Mol. Biol. 42:579–620.Google Scholar
Wagger, M. G. and Mengel, D. B. 1988. The role of nonleguminous cover crops in the efficient use of water and nitrogen. Pages 115–127 In Cropping Strategies for Efficient Use of Water and Nitrogen. Madison, WI: Spec. Publ. 51. ASA, CSSA, and SSSA.Google Scholar
Worsham, A. D. 1991. Role of cover crops in weed management and water quality. Pages 141–145 In Hargrove, W. L., ed. Cover Crops for Clean Water. Ankeny, IA: Soil and Water Conservation Society of America.Google Scholar