Abstract
Potato is the third most important food crop worldwide. However, genetic and genomic research of potato has lagged behind other major crops due to the autopolyploidy and highly heterozygous nature associated with the potato genome. Reliable and technically undemanding techniques are not available for functional gene assays in potato. Here we report the development of a transient gene expression and silencing system in potato. Gene expression or RNAi-based gene silencing constructs were delivered into potato leaf cells using Agrobacterium-mediated infiltration. Agroinfiltration of various gene constructs consistently resulted in potato cell transformation and spread of the transgenic cells around infiltration zones. The efficiency of agroinfiltration was affected by potato genotypes, concentration of Agrobacterium, and plant growth conditions. We demonstrated that the agroinfiltration-based transient gene expression can be used to detect potato proteins in sub-cellular compartments in living cells. We established a double agroinfiltration procedure that allows to test whether a specific gene is associated with potato late blight resistance pathway mediated by the resistance gene RB. This procedure provides a powerful approach for high throughput functional assay for a large number of candidate genes in potato late blight resistance.
Highlights
Potato (Solanum tuberosum) is the third most important food crop in the world, only to rice and wheat
The power of comparative genomics will allow us to discover potato genes based on the information from other extensively studied model plant species
We demonstrate that Agrobacterium-mediated infiltration, which has been an effective gene delivering technique in several plant species, can be adapted in potato
Summary
Potato (Solanum tuberosum) is the third most important food crop in the world, only to rice and wheat. Genetic and genomic research of potato has lagged behind most major crops. Functional discovery of genes in potato is still a lengthy process and is often hampered by the complex characteristics associated with the potato genome, including autotetraploidy, self-incompatibility, and high heterozygosity. Several gene discovery tools have been used in potato research, including transposonbased insertional mutagenesis [1,2], gene activation-tagging [3], and map-based cloning [4,5], applications of these techniques were time-consuming, resource-intensive, and technically challenging. It takes on average six months to develop a transgenic potato line using RNAi constructs. This technique can only be used to target a limited number of potato genes
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