Biological Characteristic Variation of Purified Pea Ferritin(Fer) Transgenic Rice

After seven generations of self-crossing assisted by GUS detection, twenty six homozygous transgenic rice lines were obtained. The effects of the transgene on the iron content, agronomic traits, rice quality and stress tolerance were studied. The results indicated that the average iron content of the transgenic(pea ferritin, Fer)rice(Oryza sativa)in the milled grain was 10.37 μg/g among all the homozygous lines, and only four lines (Fer34, Fer36, Fer39 and Fer65) had the iron contents significantly higher than that of the control rice, Xiushui 11 (6.46 μg/g). Significant differences in main agronomic traits such as days from sowing to heading, plant height, main panicle length, total grains of main panicle, seed setting rate, 1000 -grain -weight, and yield per plant were observed among some homozygous lines, but similar flag leaf length and number of panicles per plant were found. It showed that inserting foreign gene(Fer)had a slight impact on the main agronomic traits, but the transgene had no negative effects. The quality traits of homozygous rice lines such as the percentage of brown rice, milled rice and full milled rice, grain length, grain width, ratio of grain length and width,and amylose content were all similar to the control, whereas variations occurred in the chalkiness, translucency, alkali spreading value, gel consistency among partial homozygous lines. The responses of the homozygous lines to the low and high temperatures were not significantly correlated with the Fe contents, and the resistance to rice blast(Pyricularia oryzae), bacterial blight (Xanthomonas oryzae) and brown planthopper (Niaparvata lugens) were enhanced with the increase of Fe content. Furthermore, the possible reason of the biological characteristic variations among transgenic rice and the effects of foreign gene were discussed.