[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[SANET-MG] herbicide tolerance by catalytic antibody



The "compound" mentioned below is a mouse antibody cleverly selected to have catalytic activity. A synthetic approximation of the antibody gene is engineered into the plant. The good news is that the antibodies can be created to inactivate a range of herbicides, the bad news is that eating the GM crop more than one or twice will probably lead to anaphylactic shock , sometimes leading to death. Essentially, the food crop would have the effect of a serum treatment for disease, repeating such treatments can be deadly as unless the antibodies are disarmed to prevent a strong immune response.
nature biotechnology
Published online: 4 June 2006; | doi:10.1038/nbt1213
Herbicide-resistance conferred by expression of a catalytic antibody in Arabidopsis thaliana Yael Weiss1, Avidor Shulman2, Irina Ben Shir2, Ehud Keinan2, 3 & Shmuel Wolf1

1 The Institute of Plant Sciences and Genetics in Agriculture and the Otto Warburg Minerva Center for Agricultural Biotechnology, Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Quality Sciences, The Hebrew University, Rehovot, Israel.

2 Department of Chemistry and Institute of Catalysis Science and Technology, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Technion City, Haifa 32000, Israel.

3 Department of Molecular Biology and The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, 10550 North Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, California 92037, USA.


Engineering herbicide resistance in crops facilitates control of weed species, particularly those that are closely related to the crop, and may be useful in selecting lines that have undergone multiple transformation events. Here we show that herbicide-resistant plants can be engineered by designing an herbicide and expressing a catalytic antibody that destroys the herbicide in planta. First, we developed a carbamate herbicide that can be catalytically destroyed by the aldolase antibody 38C2. This compound has herbicidal activity on all three plant species tested. Second, the light chain and half of the heavy chain (Fab) of the catalytic antibody were targeted to the endoplasmic reticulum in two classes of Arabidopsis thaliana transformants. Third, the two transgenic plants were crossed to produce an herbicide-resistant F1 hybrid. The in vitro catalytic activity of the protein from F1 hybrids corroborates that catalytic antibodies can be constitutively expressed in transgenic plants, and that they can confer a unique trait.herbicide resistance with catalytic antibodies

********************************************************
To unsubscribe from SANET-MG:
1- Visit http://lists.sare.org/archives/sanet-mg.html to unsubscribe or;
2- Send a message to <listserv@sare.org> from the address subscribed to the list. Type "unsubscribe sanet-mg" in the body of the message.

Visit the SANET-MG archives at: http://lists.sare.org/archives/sanet-mg.html.
Questions? Visit http://www.sare.org/about/sanetFAQ.htm.
For more information on grants and other resources available through the SARE program, please visit http://www.sare.org.