Tracking of Transgene Expression in Soybean using Robotics and GFP

With the increased planting of genetically modified crops in the world over the past 10 years, it is important to develop a good understanding of the expression of introduced transgenes in plants. This is especially critical for soybean, which clearly dominates the other crops for the amount of land planted with transgenics. Most of the transgenic soybean grown world-wide contains the Roundup Ready ® trait, which provides soybean containing the trait with resistance to the herbicide, Roundup®. Although this transgene is extremely well-characterized and represents a single, successful gene introduction from almost 15 years ago, efforts continue in other university, federal and industrial laboratories to introduce other genes of interest, into this valuable crop plant. In order to study gene expression in soybean, tissues and plants are most-often extracted and the resultant products are then analyzed. Although this is necessary and useful for the final analysis, this clearly results in the destruction of the tissue and only single time point determinations can be performed. On the other hand, gene expression tracking using the green fluorescent protein (gfp) allows observations to be made, over time, from the same piece of tissue. GFP is easily visualized within living plant tissue and is therefore an extremely valuable tool for understandin