PARENT SESSION
Posters P6B Photosynthetic acclimation: Mechanisms and gene expression. Abstracts (531-578)

Firefly luciferase as a vital reporter for gene expression in tobacco chloroplasts. Yoichi Nakahira^*,1, Go Takeba¹, Takashi Shiina¹, ¹ Faculty of Human and Environment, Kyoto, Japan

ABSTRACT- Vital reporters provide the opportunity to monitor gene expression in living cells. In tobacco chloroplasts, GFP has been used as an available reporter for tissue- or cell-specific gene expression. However, GFP is too stable to detect the variance of gene expression in response to endo- and exo-genous environmental signals. In this work, we planed to employ firefly luciferase as a reporter for monitoring gene expression in tobacco chloroplasts. The firefly luciferase gene driven from the plastid psbA promoter and its 5'-UTR was stably introduced into the plastid genome. The transplastomic line successfully expressed luciferase enzyme, which accumulated up to 0.5-1% of leaf soluble protein. In the transgenic seedlings, bioluminescence derived from luciferase activity, was specifically detected in the photosynthetic tissues. Furthermore, we found that intensity of the bioluminescence obviously fluctuated in response to light and in a circadian rhythmic manner. These results suggest that firefly luciferase should be a useful reporter for plastid gene expression in higher plants.

KEY WORDS: firefly luciferase, reporter gene, plastid transformation, circadian rhythm