Team:Valencia UPV/Project/modules/biosafety

In order to make the Sexy Plant a safe plant, we developed a biosafety module which will be available for teams working with plants in future iGEM editions. The aim of the biosafety module is to avoid the dispersion of the plant’s genetic material in the environment. Two strategies were combined into the same module to make our plant safe: identity preservation and male sterility.

Identity preservation enables an easy identification of the genetically modified organism. A chromoprotein, which provides a differential pigmentation to the plant, is incorporated in the module. The implementation of this chromoprotein to our system is the result of the collaboration with NRP-UEA-Norwich, and it is also used in their project “Green Canary”.

Male sterility makes impossible the dispersion of genetic material using pollen as the vehicle. In order to achieve this dispersion restriction, the gene coding for barnase (a ribonuclease from Bacillus amyloliquefaciens) under the regulation of the tapetum-specific promoter TA29[1] is incorporated in our system. Both components are very well documented since TA29 has been used by a large number of researchers [2-6] and barnase has also been used under the regulation of different promoters [7,8] . This strategy was chosen because it had been previously used in our laboratory with satisfactory results [9]