In silico safety assessment and morphological characterization of transgenic Maruca vitrata resistant cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L. Walp)

Biotechnology and Bioinformatics

Prior to the introduction of Genetically Engineered crops into the market, their safety needs to be thoroughly scrutinized for potential allergenicity and toxicity. The use of omics tool in safety assessment has been recognized as a critical tool for generating evidence of safety or otherwise of GE crops, by the Codex Alimentarius Guidelines of WHO and FAO. The objective of this study was to perform the safety analysis of PBR cowpea. For identification of the trait, lateral flow strip test using cry1Ab strips of lot number 6M1053 was used. PCR analysis was conducted for the amplification of the transgene. In addition, the morphological characteristics of the GE crop was evaluated using a non-transgenic cowpea as a standard. In silico analysis of the transgene product was performed to evaluate its three-dimensional x-ray crystal structure using fifteen Allergen and Toxin database. A total of 8,996,415 sequence alignment was conducted using BLASTP 2.2.27+, FASTA35.04 and BLOSUM62 scoring matrix to identify distant homologs. The cutoff for the e-value and maximum identity score was set at 1.0 and 35% respectively. The toxic or allergenic criteria were not met in all the database used, suggesting that the Cry1Ab transgene of the GM cowpea is safe for consumption. Analysis by sliding 80mer, sliding 8mer and 6 amino acid exact word-match also confirmed the transgene and its source organism are non-allergenic and risk-free. Evaluation of the morphological characteristics of the event also revealed that the transgene did not lead to any phenotypical alteration of the plant.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.