Abstract
Transgenic crops have been utilized for decades to enhance agriculture and more recently have been applied as bioreactors for manufacturing pharmaceuticals. Recently, we investigated the gene expression profiles of several in-house transgenic soybean events, finding one transformant group to be consistently different from our controls. In the present study, we examined polymorphisms and sequence variations in the exomes of the same transgenic soybean events. We found that the previously dissimilar soybean line also exhibited markedly increased levels of polymorphisms within mRNA transcripts from seed tissue, many of which are classified as gene expression modifiers. The results from this work will direct future investigations to examine novel SNPs controlling traits of great interest for breeding and improving transgenic soybean crops. Further, this study marks the first work to investigate SNP rates in transgenic soybean seed tissues and demonstrates that while transgenesis may induce abundant unanticipated changes in gene expression and nucleotide variation, phenotypes and overall health of the plants examined remained unaltered.
Highlights
Over the past three decades, transgenic plant biotechnology has become integrated into the agriculture of most societies worldwide
Advantages for using soybean as an expression system include high protein content and yield, self-fertilization to simplify the generation of homozygous transformants, and the stability of endogenous proteins in seed tissues, which we have reviewed in depth previously [14]
Total SNPs detected by samtools and bcftools across the wild type control group reported a mean of 20,707 SNPs per sample (Figure 1(a)), with a mean SNP rate of one polymorphism for every 42,561 nucleotides (Figure 1(b))
Summary
Over the past three decades, transgenic plant biotechnology has become integrated into the agriculture of most societies worldwide. Coupled with self-regenerating properties and the natural ability to stably store proteins in varied environmental conditions, plants offer a multitude of advantages over traditional cell culture systems for protein generation [9]. Over the past 10 years, our laboratory has focused on Glycine max as a model system for the generation and storage of recombinant proteins that are currently expensive to manufacture and difficult to procure or synthesize in bacterial and cell-based cultures and as oral vaccine candidates by targeting gutassociated lymphoid tissues (GALT) for immune stimulation or suppression [5, 8, 10,11,12,13]. Advantages for using soybean as an expression system include high protein content and yield, self-fertilization to simplify the generation of homozygous transformants, and the stability of endogenous proteins in seed tissues, which we have reviewed in depth previously [14]
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