Transgenic merA and merB expression reduces mercury contamination in vegetables and grains grown in mercury-contaminated
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Transgenic merA and merB expression reduces mercury contamination in vegetables and grains grown in mercury‑contaminated soil Rui Li1 · Han Wu1 · Jing Ding1 · Nan Li1 · Weimin Fu1 · Lijun Gan2 · Yi Li1,3 Received: 3 January 2020 / Accepted: 16 July 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Key message 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. Keywords Mercury · MerA · MerB · Vegetable · Grains Abbreviations merA Mercury-resistance operon gene A merB Mercury-resistance operon gene B MB Mercury-breathing
Communicated by Günther Hahne. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00299-020-02570-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Lijun Gan [email protected] * Yi Li [email protected] 1
State Key Laboratory of Crop Genetics & Germplasm Enhancement and College of Horticulture, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing 210095, China
2
College of Life Sciences, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing 210095, China
3
Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, USA
qRT-PCR Quantitative real-time PCR WT Wild-type
Introduction Mercury (Hg) is ubiquitous in the environment. Every year, 18,000–22,000 tons of mercury is released into the environment from natural sources, and approximately 20,000 tons from anthropogenic sources (AMAP/UNEP 2013). Mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants are the main source of anthropogenic discharge, and municipal waste combustion, chlor-alkali plants, gold mining, and fluorescent lamp factories
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