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Herbicide-resistance conferred by expression of a catalytic antibody in Arabidopsis thaliana

Nature Biotechnology volume 24, pages 713–717 (2006)Cite this article

Abstract

Engineering herbicide resistance in crops facilitates control of weed species, particularly those that are closely related to the crop, and may be useful in selecting lines that have undergone multiple transformation events. Here we show that herbicide-resistant plants can be engineered by designing an herbicide and expressing a catalytic antibody that destroys the herbicide in planta. First, we developed a carbamate herbicide that can be catalytically destroyed by the aldolase antibody 38C2. This compound has herbicidal activity on all three plant species tested. Second, the light chain and half of the heavy chain (Fab) of the catalytic antibody were targeted to the endoplasmic reticulum in two classes of Arabidopsis thaliana transformants. Third, the two transgenic plants were crossed to produce an herbicide-resistant F1 hybrid. The in vitro catalytic activity of the protein from F1 hybrids corroborates that catalytic antibodies can be constitutively expressed in transgenic plants, and that they can confer a unique trait.

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Figure 1: Herbicidal activity of keto-cartamates.
Figure 2: In vitro retroaldolase activity of 38C2 (Fab) extracted from E. coli.
Figure 3: Influence of herbicide 9 on the rooting and development of seedlings of F1 hybrids and control A. thaliana plants.
Figure 4: Retroaldolase activity 38C2 (Fab) extracted from transgenic plants.

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Acknowledgements

E.K. thanks the Israel-US Binational Science Foundation, the German-Israeli Project Cooperation and the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology. Y.W. is a Kinamon Foundation Scholar. A.S. is a Clore Foundation Scholar. We thank Einat Brill Almon for assistance with the herbicidal assays.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Institute of Plant Sciences and Genetics in Agriculture and the Otto Warburg Minerva Center for Agricultural Biotechnology, Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Quality Sciences, The Hebrew University, Rehovot, Israel

    Yael Weiss & Shmuel Wolf

  2. Department of Chemistry and Institute of Catalysis Science and Technology, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Technion City, Haifa, 32000, Israel

    Avidor Shulman, Irina Ben Shir & Ehud Keinan

  3. Department of Molecular Biology and The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, 10550 North Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, 92037, California, USA

    Ehud Keinan

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  1. Yael Weiss
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Correspondence to Ehud Keinan.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Fig. 1

A general view of the herbicidal activity of propham (P) and compounds 9, 8, 5, and 6 with respect to germination of Arabidopsis (var. Columbia) seeds. (PDF 3593 kb)

Supplementary Fig. 2

Herbicidal activity of 9 with Desiree potato shoots. (PDF 4975 kb)

Supplementary Fig. 3

Inactivation of herbicide 1 by antibody 38C2 as assayed on Lemna cultures. (PDF 1311 kb)

Supplementary Methods (PDF 160 kb)

Supplementary Note 1 (PDF 133 kb)

Supplementary Note 2 (PDF 81 kb)

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Weiss, Y., Shulman, A., Shir, I. et al. Herbicide-resistance conferred by expression of a catalytic antibody in Arabidopsis thaliana. Nat Biotechnol 24, 713–717 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt1213

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