Background: The mycobacteriophage large serine recombinase Bxb1 catalyzes site-specific recombination\r\nbetween its corresponding attP and attB recognition sites. Previously, we and others have shown that Bxb1 has\r\ncatalytic activity in various eukaryotic species including Nicotiana tabacum, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, insects and\r\nmammalian cells.\r\nResults: In this work, the Bxb1 recombinase gene was transformed and constitutively expressed in Arabidopsis\r\nthaliana plants harboring a chromosomally integrated attP and attB-flanked target sequence. The Bxb1\r\nrecombinase successfully excised the target sequence in a conservative manner and the resulting recombination\r\nevent was heritably transmitted to subsequent generations in the absence of the recombinase transgene. In\r\naddition, we also show that Bxb1 recombinase expressing plants can be manually crossed with att-flanked target\r\ntransgenic plants to generate excised progeny.\r\nConclusion: The Bxb1 large serine recombinase performs site-specific recombination in Arabidopsis thaliana\r\ngerminal tissue, producing stable lines free of unwanted DNA. The precise site-specific deletion produced by Bxb1\r\nin planta demonstrates that this enzyme can be a useful tool for the genetic engineering of plants without\r\nselectable marker transgenes or other undesirable exogenous sequences.
Loading....