Fanjuan Meng , Ying Kang , Di Wu , Mu Peng , Qiuyu Wang

School of Life Science, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin, 150040, China
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Soil Biology, 2016, Vol. 7, No. 1   
Received: 30 Jan., 2016    Accepted: 04 Feb., 2016    Published: 03 Feb., 2016

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To study the potential influence of transgenic Populus simonii×P. nigra on the soil microbial community composition and horizontal exogenous gene transfer, fresh transgenic leaves were treated in broadleaf and coniferous forest soil for 6 months in the laboratory. The NPTII gene as the marker and Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), the spider insecticidal peptide gene, as the target gene of the transgenic poplar were detected using PCR, in which the target gene is a fusion of the C-terminus of the Bt-toxin gene and the spider insecticidal peptide gene. The bacteria, actinomycetes, and fungi from different soil samples were cultivated and counted. The results showed that DNA fragments of the target and marker genes were completely degraded before 120 days. The dominant colony is the bacterium whose number is much more than that of other microbes under the same treatment. The number of cultivable bacteria treated by transgenic litters was significantly higher than the number treated by non-transgenic litters in selective medium with kanamycin. Total DNA was extracted from cultivable entophytic bacteria in the decomposed leaves and soil bacteria near the transgenic litters. The percentages of PCR-positive results in the soil bacterial clones treated by transgenic litter all exceeded 40% for the marker gene and were much higher than those of the non-transgenic controls. The target gene in the entophytic and soil bacteria, with 1.92% and 3.08% PCR-positive results, was found only in broadleaf forest soil. This result showed a certain possibility of horizontal gene transfer from the transgenic poplar to soil bacteria.

Transgenic poplar; Bt-the spider insecticidal peptide gene; NPTII gene; Soil microbe; Horizontal gene transfe

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