Design of a biotechnological tool for increasing protein expression in plants

GONZALEZ DH; MANSILLA N; TORTI P; WELCHEN E

Congreso; LII Reunión Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigaciones en Bioquímica y Biología Molecular (SAIB); 2016

We previously characterized promoter regions of several accessory proteins involved in mitochondrial biogenesis in Arabidopsis. A relative common characteristic of these genes is the presence of an intron in their 5? UTR. We tested one of these introns (I) and a mutated version (IM) as biotechnological tools for increasing expression of different proteins. We analyzed Arabidopsis plants stably transformed with different genetic constructions and observed that the I element is absolutely necessary for gene expression in the context of its own promoter. Furthermore, the IM version produces higher expression levels when compared with I and also acts synergistically with the strong constitutive promoter CaMV35S to increase transcript levels and protein expression. Addition of IM to a construct for expressing an Arabidopsis gene related to oxidative stress increases seed yield above the levels obtained with CaMV35S alone, both under control conditions and after stress situations. The enhancer activity of IM was also observed in monocot plants using transient transformation assays. We propose the use of IM as a genetic tool for increasing the expression of genes and proteins of interest in plants.