Abstract
Artemisinin is an effective antimalarial drug isolated from the medicinal plant Artemisia annua L. Due to its increasing market demand and the low yield in A. annua, there is a great interest in increasing its production. In this paper, in an attempt
to increase artemisinin content of A. annua by suppressing the expression of β-caryophyllene synthase, a sesquiterpene synthase competing as a precursor of artemisinin,
the antisense fragment (750 bp) of β-caryophyllene synthase cDNA was inserted into the plant expression vector pBI121
and introduced into A. annua by Agrobacterium-mediated transformation. PCR and Southern hybridization confirmed the stable integration
of multiple copies of the transgene in 5 different transgenic lines of A. annua. Reverse transcription PCR showed that the expression of endogenous CPS in the transgenic lines was significantly lower than that in the wild-type control
A. annua plants, and β-caryophyllene content decreased sharply in the transgenic lines in comparison to
the control. The artemisinin content of one of the transgenic lines showed an increase
of 54.9 % compared with the wild-type control. The present study demonstrated that
the inhibition pathway in the precursor competition for artemisinin biosynthesis by
anti-sense technology is an effective means of increasing the artemisinin content
of A. annua plants.
Key words
Artemisia annua L. - Asteraceae - artemisinin biosynthesis - anti-sense β-caryophyllene synthase gene - genetic transformation
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Dr. Hong Wang
College of Life Sciences
Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
19A Yuquanlu
Beijing, 100049
P. R. China
Phone: +86 10 62 83 62 39
Fax: +86 10 88 25 60 80
Email: wangh@ibcas.ac.cn
