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Transgenic merA and merB expression reduces mercury contamination in vegetables and grains grown in mercury-contaminated soil

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Abstract

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Arabidopsis, tobacco, tomato and rice with merA / merB expressed reduced mercury concentration of leaves, fruits or grains. These mercury-breathing plants produce agricultural products with acceptable levels of mercury from contaminated soil.

Abstract

Mercury contamination in plant food products can cause serious health risks to consumers. Transgenic approaches to enhance mercury phytoremediation have been accomplished with expression of bacterial merA and merB genes to convert toxic organic mercury to less toxic elemental mercury. However, little is known whether these genes can be used to produce safe foods from plants grown on mercury-contaminated land. We have used Arabidopsis and tobacco as model plants for leafy vegetables, and tomato and rice as representative fruit and grain crops to investigate whether merA and merB expression allows for production of safe foods from mercury-contaminated soils. Our results show that grown on heavily contaminated land with mercury, merA and merB expressing transgenic plants can produce vegetables, fruits and grains safe for human and animal consumption, while the wild-type plants cannot. The merA and merB transgenic plants can also efficiently remove mercury from soil. With increasing mercury contamination problems for the agricultural land worldwide, the use of the merA and merB genes can help produce safe food from mercury-polluted land and also remediate contaminated soils.

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Abbreviations

merA :

Mercury-resistance operon gene A

merB :

Mercury-resistance operon gene B

MB:

Mercury-breathing

qRT-PCR:

Quantitative real-time PCR

WT:

Wild-type

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Introduction of Talents Foundation of Nanjing Agricultural University to Yi Li and the Grant of “Jiangsu’s Double Plan Project for Entrepreneurship and Innovation” to Yi Li.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Crop Genetics & Germplasm Enhancement and College of Horticulture, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, 210095, China

    Rui Li, Han Wu, Jing Ding, Nan Li, Weimin Fu & Yi Li

  2. College of Life Sciences, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, 210095, China

    Lijun Gan

  3. Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, 06269, USA

    Yi Li

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  1. Rui Li
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  2. Han Wu
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  3. Jing Ding
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  4. Nan Li
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  5. Weimin Fu
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  6. Lijun Gan
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Contributions

YL conceived, and YL, RL, HW, LG, and JD designed the experiments. RL performed the experiments and analyzed the data. JD, HW, NL and WF provided helps in the experiments. RL, HW, LG, and YL co-wrote and edited the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Lijun Gan or Yi Li.

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Li, R., Wu, H., Ding, J. et al. Transgenic merA and merB expression reduces mercury contamination in vegetables and grains grown in mercury-contaminated soil. Plant Cell Rep 39, 1369–1380 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00299-020-02570-8

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