Establishment of a homogenized method for environmental biosafety assessments of transgenic plants

Abstract

The development of transgenic plants may help alleviate both environmental and food problems. In Japan, transgenic plants cannot be planted in the field without undergoing an environmental biosafety assessment under confined and semi-confined conditions. The main objectives of environmental biosafety assessment studies are to define the properties of the host plant and to evaluate its influence on other organisms. To appraise the influence of a transgenic plant on other plants, the transgenic plant is examined for new compounds that influence plant growth by measuring germinating seeds. Previously, we assessed the allelopathic activity of several transgenic plants using the sandwich to assay the allelopathic activity of leachate from dried leaf samples. However, because Eucalyptus leaves are difficult to dry, the sandwich does not allow the evaluation of multiple samples at the same time. Here, we report a new method that relies on homogenizing fleshy leaf samples, instead of drying them. The alleopathic activity of a non- transgenic plant and an Antisense-lim transgenic plant were evaluated using both the sandwich and the homogenized to determine whether the homogenized was available for in biosafety assessments of transgenic plants. The homogenized may be an effective and useful tool for evaluating differences between non-transgenic and transgenic plants using multiple, concurrent samples.