Micronutrient malnutrition is widespread, especially in poor populations across the globe, and iron deficiency anemia is one of the most prevalent forms of micronutrient deficiencies. Iron deficiency anemia has severe consequences for human health, working ability, and quality of life. Several interventions including iron supplementation and food fortification have been attempted and met with varied degrees of success. Rice, which is a staple food for over half of the world’s population, is an important target crop for iron biofortification. The genetic variability of iron content in the rice germplasm is very narrow, and thus, conventional breeding has not been successful in developing high iron rice varieties. Therefore, genetic engineering approaches have targeted at increasing iron uptake, translocation, and storage in the rice endosperm. We previously reported that AtIRT1, when expressed together with AtNAS1 and PvFERRITIN (PvFER) in high-iron (NFP) rice, has a synergistic effect of further increasing the iron concentration of polished rice grains. We have now engineered rice expressing AtIRT1, AtNAS1, and PvFER as a single locus gene cassette and compared the resulting lines with transgenic lines expressing AtIRT1 and PvFER gene cassettes. We also evaluated the efficacies of the MsENOD12B and native AtIRT1 promoters for the expression of AtIRT1 in rice in both types of gene cassettes, and found the native AtIRT1 promoter to be a better choice for driving the AtIRT1 expression in our biofortification strategy. All the single insertion transgenic lines have significant increases of iron concentration, both in polished and unpolished grains, but the concerted expression of AtIRT1, AtNAS1, and PvFER resulted to be a more effective strategy in achieving the highest iron increases of up to 10.46 μg/g dry weight. Furthermore, the transformed high iron lines grew better under iron deficiency growth conditions and also have significantly increased grain zinc concentration. Together, these rice lines have nutritionally relevant increases in polished grain iron and zinc concentration necessary to support human health.
Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is the leading cause of blindness among children and is associated with high risk of maternal mortality. In order to enhance the bioavailability of vitamin A, high carotenoid transgenic golden rice has been developed by manipulating enzymes, such as phytoene synthase (psy) and phytoene desaturase (crtI). In this study, proteome and metabolite analyses were carried out to comprehend metabolic regulation and adaptation of transgenic golden rice after the manipulation of endosperm specific carotenoid pathways. The main alteration was observed in carbohydrate metabolism pathways of the transgenic seeds. The 2D based proteomic studies demonstrated that carbohydrate metabolism-related enzymes, such as pullulanase, UDP-glucose pyrophosphorylase, and glucose-1-phosphate adenylyltransferase, were primarily up-regulated in transgenic rice seeds. In addition, the enzyme PPDK was also elevated in transgenic seeds thus enhancing pyruvate biosynthesis, which is the precursor in the carotenoids biosynthetic pathway. GC-MS based metabolite profiling demonstrated an increase in the levels of glyceric acid, fructo-furanose, and galactose, while decrease in galactonic acid and gentiobiose in the transgenic rice compared to WT. It is noteworthy to mention that the carotenoid content, especially β-carotene level in transgenic rice (4.3 μg/g) was significantly enhanced. The present study highlights the metabolic adaptation process of a transgenic golden rice line (homozygous T4 progeny of SKBR-244) after enhancing carotenoid biosynthesis. The presented information would be helpful in the development of crops enriched in carotenoids by expressing metabolic flux of pyruvate biosynthesis.
Frontiers in Plant Science
Plant Responses to Phosphorus and Nitrogen Starvation: Genetic Insights and Agricultural Innovations