Studies On Unintended Effects Of Transgenic Barley And Cotton

Recently, studies on unintended effects of transgenic crops have been regarding as one of the most widely concerned issues. By doing research on different transgenic barley and transgenic cotton comparing with their respective control materials, we intend to find differences occurred in the major nutritional components including protein, fatty acid and mineral elements and the changes of metabolic profiling.The results show that the segregation ratio of generation of T1in transgenic barley transferring LUC and HTP gene doesn’t accord with the mendelian genetic law. Besides, there is no significant difference between generation of T1in transgenic barley seeds and their non-transgenic controls on the aspect of agronomic characters, and so are different genotypes of barley seeds except for the significant changes of panicle weight between1T1and1NT1and plant height between generation of T1and T2in the filling stage. At the same time, there are also no significant differences between generation of T1in transgenic barley seeds and their non-transgenic controls on the aspect of content of protein, mineral elements and fatty acid, except that some individual lines appear significant changes of those major nutritional components compared with their non-transgenic controls. Among different genotypes of barley seeds, the result is the same to generation of T1lines. The results for all of the transgenic cottonseeds show more significant variation which occurred in protein, mineral elements and fatty acid. And most of the transgenic cottonseeds show unintended effects such as the lack of protein subunits and significant changes of the composition of fatty acids by taking linoleic acid as a representation. Based on FTIR and NMR, the results of non-targeted analysis show that there are no obvious differences between all of the transgenic barley seeds and transgenic cottonseeds with their respective controls in chemical composition, but the content of some chemical constituents appear apparent differences in cottonseeds after being genetically modified. Furthermore, transgenic barley seed4T1and transgenic cotton seed SGK321have significant changes of protein secondary structure with their respective controls It can be inferred that protein aggregation may happen in the bodies. While metabolic profiling mainly shows the changes of carbohydrate, amino acids and so on in part of the transgenic barley seeds and all of the transgenic cottonseeds. The unintended effect of transgenic cotton seeds is more obvious than that of transgenic barley seeds, and the changes of major nutritional components in transgenic cotton seeds are beyond the range of natural variation among different cotton varieties. The result of comparative analysis among different genotypes of transgenic barley seeds shows that the significant differences exsit mainly between non-transgenic ones and the original control. It is inferred that the somaclonal variation in the course of tissue culture is the main reason that arouse the unintended effect of transgenic barley.