Open AccessAssessment of Heat Shock Protein 70 Induction by Heat in Alfalfa Varieties and Constitutive Overexpression in Transgenic Plants
Author(s) -
Nicoletta Ferradini,
Rina Iannacone,
Stefano Capomaccio,
Alessandra Metelli,
Nadia Armentano,
Lucia Semeraro,
Francesco Cellini,
F. Veronesi,
D. Rosellini
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0126051
Subject(s) - heat shock protein , biology , hsp70 , transgene , genetically modified crops , arabidopsis , arabidopsis thaliana , transformation (genetics) , microbiology and biotechnology , immunogenicity , agrobacterium , heat shock , gene , immune system , genetics , mutant
Heat shock proteins (HSPs) are molecular chaperones involved in many cellular functions. It has been shown that mammalian cytosolic HSP70 binds antigenic peptides mediating the activation of the immune system, and that it plays a determining role in tumour immunogenicity. This suggests that HSP70 may be used for the production of conjugated vaccines. Human and plant HSPs share high sequence similarity and some important biological functions in vitro . In addition, plant HSPs have no endotoxic side effects. Extraction of HSP70 from plants for use as vaccine adjuvant requires enhancing its concentration in plant tissues. In this work, we explored the possibility to produce HSP70 in both transgenic and non-transgenic plants, using alfalfa as a model species. First, a transcriptional analysis of a constitutive and an inducible HSP70 genes was conducted in Arabidopsis thaliana . Then the coding sequence of the inducible form was cloned and introduced into alfalfa by Agrobacterium -mediated transformation, and the accumulation of the protein in leaf tissue of transgenic plants was demonstrated. We also tested diverse alfalfa varieties for heat-inducible expression of endogenous HSP70, revealing variety-specific responses to heat shock.