Plant breeding involving genetic engineering does not result in unacceptable unintended effects in rice relative to conventional cross‐breeding

Abstract

SUMMARY Advancements in ‐omics techniques provide powerful tools to assess the potential effects in composition of a plant at the RNA, protein and metabolite levels. These technologies can thus be deployed to assess whether genetic engineering (GE) causes changes in plants that go beyond the changes introduced by conventional plant breeding. Here, we compare the extent of transcriptome and metabolome modification occurring in leaves of four GE rice lines expressing Bacillus thuringiensis genes developed by GE and seven rice lines developed by conventional cross‐breeding. The results showed that both types of crop breeding methods can bring changes at transcriptomic and metabolic levels, but the differences were comparable between the two methods, and were less than those between conventional non‐GE lines were. Metabolome profiling analysis found several new metabolites in GE rice lines when compared with the closest non‐GE parental lines, but these compounds were also found in several of the conventionally bred rice lines. Functional analyses suggest that the differentially expressed genes and metabolites caused by both GE and conventional cross‐breeding do not involve detrimental metabolic pathways. The study successfully employed RNA‐sequencing and high‐performance liquid chromatography mass spectrometry technology to assess the unintended changes in new rice varieties, and the results suggest that GE does not cause unintended effects that go beyond conventional cross‐breeding in rice.

Genetically Modified Soybean Lines Exhibit Less Transcriptomic Variation Compared to Natural Narieties

“…The DEGs were shared by different varieties. The differences in numbers of DEGs among the natural varieties were even larger than those between the GM lines and their donor parents, which is consistent with reports from several previous studies [17,18].…”

“…In this study, four different tissues, cotyledon (C), germ (G), hypocotyl (H), and radicle (R) of four GMPs and three donor parents were selected to analyze the unintended effects. In previous studies, most studies that have analyzed unintended effects in GM and non-GM lines have performed sequencing and analysis on only one speci c tissue or mixed tissue [18,19]. For example, Liu et al(2020) used the leave tissues of four GE rice lines expressing Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) genes that developed by genetic engineering and seven rice lines developed by conventional cross-breeding to discover the unintended effects, and there were only tens of DEGs identi ed.…”

Transcriptomic and Metabolomic Responses of Rice Plants to Cnaphalocrocis medinalis Caterpillar Infestation

“…Metabolome analyses of the leaf samples were performed as previously described [ 24 ]. Briefly, the freeze-dried leaf samples were grinded using a mixer mill (MM 400, Retsch, Haan, Germany) for 1.5 min at 30 Hz.…”

“…The supervised multivariate method, orthogonal projections to latent structures discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA), was used to determine differentially accumulated metabolites (DAMs) between leaves fed upon by C. medinalis and control leaves. The relative importance of each metabolite to the OPLS-DA model was checked using the variable importance in projection (VIP) metric [ 24 ]. Metabolites with VIP ≥ 1.0 and fold change ≥ 2 or fold change ≤ 0.5 were considered as DAMs for group comparations.…”

Cooperative herbivory between two important pests of rice

“…RNA-seq analyses were performed as described previously 63 . In brief, total RNA was extracted using the TRIzol reagent (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, CA, USA) and treated with RNase-free DNase I (NEB, Ipswich, MA, USA) to remove any genomic DNA.…”