Progressive 35S promoter methylation increases rapidly during vegetative development in transgenic Nicotiana attenuata plants.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Genetically modified plants are widely used in agriculture and increasingly in ecological research to enable the selective manipulation of plant traits in the field. Despite their broad usage, many aspects of unwanted transgene silencing throughout plant development are still poorly understood. A transgene can be epigenetically silenced by a process called RNA directed DNA methylation (RdDM), which can be seen as a heritable loss of gene expression. The spontaneous nature of transgene silencing has been widely reported, but patterns of acquirement remain still unclear.

Results

Transgenic wild tobacco plants (Nicotiana attenuata) expressing heterologous genes coding for antimicrobial peptides displayed an erratic and variable occurrence of transgene silencing. We f

SUBMITTER: Weinhold A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3716894 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature