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The effect of Bt-transgene introgression on plant growth and reproduction in wild Brassica juncea

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Abstract

This study aims to investigate the relative plant growth and reproduction of insect-resistant and susceptible plants following the introgression of an insect-resistance Bt-transgene from Brassica napus, oilseed rape, to wild Brassica juncea. The second backcrossed generation (BC2) from a single backcross family was grown in pure and mixed stands of Bt-transgenic and non-transgenic siblings under two insect treatments. Various proportions of Bt-transgenic plants were employed in mixed stands to study the interaction between resistant and susceptible plants. In the pure stands, Bt-transgenic BC2 plants performed better than non-transgenic plants with or without insect treatments. In mixed stands, Bt-transgenic BC2 plants produced fewer seeds than their non-Bt counterparts at low proportions of Bt-transgenic BC2 plants in the absence of insects. Reproductive allocation of non-transgenic plants marginally increased with increasing proportions of Bt-transgenic plants under herbivore pressure, which resulted in increased total biomass and seed production per stand. The results showed that the growth of non-transgenic plants was protected by Bt-transgenic plants under herbivore pressure. The Bt-transgene might not be advantageous in mixed stands of backcrossed hybrids; thus transgene introgression would not be facilitated when herbivorous insects are not present. However, a relatively large initial population of Bt-transgenic plants might result in transgene persistence when target herbivores are present.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Xin Jing and Hanbin Wu for their assistance in field experiments. This work is supported by two projects of the Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 30970432 and 31270578) and a Ph.D. joint fellowship from the French Embassy at Beijing (CNOUS, No. 20072315) and enabled by a USDA Biotechnology Risk Assessment Grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 20 Nanxincun, Beijing, 100093, China

    Yong-Bo Liu, Wei Wei, Zhi-Xi Tang & Ke-Ping Ma

  2. INRA, UMR1347 Agroécologie, 17 rue Sully, BP 86510, 21065, Dijon, France

    Yong-Bo Liu & Henry Darmency

  3. State Key Laboratory of Environmental Criteria and Risk Assessment, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Beijing, 100012, China

    Yong-Bo Liu

  4. Department of Plant Sciences, University of Tennessee, 2431 Joe Johnson Drive, Knoxville, TN, 37996-4561, USA

    C. Neal Stewart Jr.

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  1. Yong-Bo Liu
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  2. Henry Darmency
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  3. C. Neal Stewart Jr.
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  4. Wei Wei
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  5. Zhi-Xi Tang
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Correspondence to Wei Wei.

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Liu, YB., Darmency, H., Stewart, C.N. et al. The effect of Bt-transgene introgression on plant growth and reproduction in wild Brassica juncea . Transgenic Res 24, 537–547 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11248-014-9858-0

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