Difference between revisions of "Team:SCAU-China/Safety"

As our project is to use the rice as a factory to produce astaxanthin, and we also hope that aSTARice can serve as a kind of food in human’s daily lives one days, so we are very concerned about the safety of aSTARice.

We believe that risks are mainly embodied in two aspects. The frist problem is that the encoding products of marker genes might be toxic and allergenic potentially for human or livestock. Antibiotic genes might be transferred into gut microbes’ genome of humans or animals, increasing the resistance of the microbes to the antibiotic. The other one is that marker genes could spread through pollens or other ways into other organisms, which is termed gene flow. In population genetics, gene flow (also known as gene migration) is the transfer of alleles or genes from one population to another, which may lead to unimaginable damage to the ecological environment.

In order to reduce the effects of pollen-mediated crop-to-crop transgene flow on environment, we use a technique called selectable marker-free system, so the final aSTARice is a marker-free transgenic plants(MFTPs). We design a Cre-loxP based side-direct recombinant system to knock out hygromycin phosphotransferase gene, minimizing the effect of the selectable maker gene.

To further reduce the unpredictable threat of gene flow, we grow rice in pot culture and greenhouse-environment. What's more, we are also analyzing coding products by HPLC and trying to make sure that there is no harmful products in our rice.

Because we are the first team who choose rice as a chassis, we have to assess the safety for rice. Rice is the self-pollinated plant so that the genotype in the individuals is pure and homogeneous. The probabilities that two flowers take place cross-pollinated is one percent, and the distance of the spread of rice pollen is close to one meter. Rice isn’t included in the white line, so we make a checked-in on the official website.