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No evidence for transient transformation via pollen magnetofection in several monocot species

Nature Plants volume 6, pages 1323–1324 (2020)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 27 November 2017

arising from X. Zhao et al. Nature Plants https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-017-0063-z (2017)

Pollen magnetofection1 was previously reported to deliver exogenous DNA into pollen grains both for transient transformation and for the creation of stable, genetically modified progeny. This study finds no evidence that magnetofection can accomplish transient transformation of pollen in several monocot species. Achieving stable transformation of plants remains a major hurdle except in a few species, hindering efficient progress towards both basic and applied scientific goals. Thus, the approach of pollen magnetofection, described by Zhao et al.1, was greeted as a potentially transformative technology. In this approach, magnetic nanoparticles deliver exogenous DNA into pollen grains, which then generate genetically modified progeny incorporating that DNA into their genome. Independently, we set up trials to investigate the effectiveness of this approach in two monocot species, maize (at Oregon State University) and sorghum (at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). Both species, which require specialized expertise and demanding methodologies to achieve transformation2, are of interest as models for basic biological investigation as well as for their agricultural impact. Moreover, both species produce readily accessible pollen, raising the possibility that the pollen magnetofection approach could be easily implementable with these grasses. However, we were unable to accomplish transient transformation of pollen via magnetofection in either species, or in a third monocot, lily.

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Fig. 1: Detection of GFP fluorescence after biolistic bombardment and after magnetofection.

Data availability

All datasets generated or analysed during the current study are included in this published article (and its Supplementary Information) or are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

R.S. acknowledges IUSSTF-DBT for the GETin fellowship. This work was funded in part by NSF grant no. IOS-1832186 (Z.V., C.W. and J.E.F.) and by the DOE Joint BioEnergy Institute (http://www.jbei.org) supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research through contract no. DEAC0205CH11231 between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the US Department of Energy (R.S., H.V.S. and J.C.M.). We thank A. Harkess for opening a community discussion of pollen magnetofection results on Twitter.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    Zuzana Vejlupkova, Cedar Warman & John E. Fowler

  2. Joint BioEnergy Institute, Emeryville, CA, USA

    Rita Sharma, Henrik Vibe Scheller & Jenny C. Mortimer

  3. Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Rita Sharma, Henrik Vibe Scheller & Jenny C. Mortimer

  4. Crop Genetics and Informatics Group, School of Computational & Integrative Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

    Rita Sharma

  5. Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Henrik Vibe Scheller

  6. Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing, Oregon States University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    John E. Fowler

Authors
  1. Zuzana Vejlupkova
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Contributions

H.V.S., R.S., J.C.M., C.W. and J.E.F. conceived the experimental plan and design. R.S., C.W. and Z.V. performed the experiments and analysed the data. J.C.M., H.V.S. and J.E.F. supervised the experiments. J.E.F. wrote the initial manuscript draft, and all authors contributed to revision.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to John E. Fowler.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Plants thanks the anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1 and 2, Table 2 and Methods.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Table 1

Magnetofection trials and parameters tested with sorghum and maize pollen, assessed for transient transformation by screening for GFP reporter expression.

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Vejlupkova, Z., Warman, C., Sharma, R. et al. No evidence for transient transformation via pollen magnetofection in several monocot species. Nat. Plants 6, 1323–1324 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-020-00798-6

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