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[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
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