Vectors Construction

We have successfully constructed 2 backbones, piGEM001 and piGEM002. And we have verified them using digestion (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2) and sequencing.

Fig. 1 Digestion the plasmid piGEM001 with HpaI and SpeI
M: DNA molecular weight marker
2: piGEM001_2(false positive)
3: piGEM001_3

Then we have successfully constructed 6 monogene expression vectors, from vector piGEM003 to vector piGEM008. And we have verified all of them using digestion and sequcencing. Here we only show the result of vector piGEM005(Fig. 3). You can browse notebook for more results.

In order to enhance the ability of tobacco to metabolize formaldehyde, we have successfully constructed 3 multigenge expression vectors, from vector piGEM009 to vector piGEM011.We have verified all of them using digestion (Fig.4, Fig.5 and Fig.6) and sequcencing.

Plant transformation

Tobacco was transformed essentially using the leaf disk co-cultivation protocol of Horsch.This protocol includes three stages, co-cultivation (Fig. 7), screening cultivation (Fig. 8) and rooting cultivation (Fig.9). We have successfully transformed each vector into babacco

Molecular identifition

We extracted DNA from mature tobacco seedlings. And then we used specific primers to amplify the target gene to verify the positive seedlings (Fig. 10). Next we extracted RNA from tobacco leaves which are DNA positive.we used RT-PCR to detect whether target gene was expressed.

Phenotype testing

Finally we expose the tobacco seedlings into formaldehyde surroundings. One week later We observed the phenotype of transgeneic plants and widetype (Fig. 12). We found that the transgenetic seedling is stronger than wildtype after formaldehyde exposure.

For quantity result, we used a HCHO detector to detect the concentration of gaseous HCHO (Fig. 13).

These results indicate that the HCHO assimilation pathway strongly enhanced not only the tolerance of the transgenic plants to exogenous HCHO, but also their ability to take up and eliminate gaseous HCHO.