选择标记可去除的植物高效表达载体的构建

在常用的植物组成型表达载体pBI121的选择标记基因NPTII两侧插入同向的lox位点并用多克隆位点(MCS)取代了GUS基因序列,构建了NPTII基因可被去除的和可插入目的基因的通用植物表达载体pBI121-lox-MCS。替换pBI121-lox-MCS中驱动目的基因表达的35S启动子,可构建成一系列具有其他表达特性的植物表达载体,如本文描述的韧皮部特异表达载体pBdENP-lox-MCS。为方便地筛选去除选择标记基因的转基因植物,还构建了绿色荧光蛋白(GFP)表达框与NPTII表达框连锁的pBI121-gfp-lox-MCS载体。上述植物表达载体可广泛应用于培育选择标记可去除的转基因植物。

Construction of Selectable Marker-removable Plant Expression Vectors

The commonly used plant constitutive expression vector pBI121 was modified by insertion of two directly orientated lox sites each at one end of the selectable marker gene NPTII and by replacing the GUS gene with a sequence composed of multiple cloning sites (MCS). The resulting plant expression vector pBI121-lox-MCS is widely usable to accommodate various target genes through the MCS, and more importantly to allow the NPTII gene removed from transformed plants upon the action of the Cre recombinase. In addition, the CaMV 35S promoter located upstream of the MCS can be substituted with any other promoters to form plant vectors with expression features specified by the introduced promoters. Provided in this paper is an example that an enhanced phloem-specific promoter of the pumpkin PP2 gene (named dENP) was used to construct an NPTII-removable phloem-specific expression vector pBdENP-lox-MCS. Moreover, to facilitate screening of selectable marker-removed transgenic plants, we constructed another vector pBI121-gfp-lox-MCS in which a gfp-expression cassette is linked to the NPTII gene and the composite sequence is flanked by lox sites. Thus the selectable marker-free plants can be visually identified by loss of GFP fluorescence. The above newly created plant expression vectors can be used to develop selectable marker-removable transgenic plants for a variety of purposes.