ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Functional and Applied Plant Genomics
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1513367
Gene flow from weedy rice to T1c-19 transgenic rice stacked with cry1C*/bar genes and fitness of F1 hybrids
Provisionally accepted
- Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, China
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Bidirectional gene flow via pollen between transgenic rice and weedy rice could occur in natural fields. Gene flow from transgenic rice to weedy rice has been confirmed in many studies, and thus results F1 hybrids could persist in natural agroecosystems due to their unimpaired reproductive ability. However, the reverse gene flow from weedy rice to transgenic rice is rarely reported. We quantified reverse gene flow from three weedy rice accessions to transgenic rice line T1c-19 with cry1C*/bar. In field trials with alternating layout of cultivating transgenic rice and weedy rice accessions and adjacent layout cultivating them in a close vicinity, the reverse gene flow was detected but varied according to the weedy rice accession. No gene flow from WRTZ was observed, while gene flows from WRMM planted were observed at 0.0508% and 0.0808%, respectively, and those from WRYY were 0.0692% and 0.1008%, respectively. Reverse F1 (RF1) plants obtained by manual pollination between weedy rice and transgenic rice exhibited significantly higher composite fitness compared to their weedy rice counterparts, due to enhanced fecundity-related traits observed under both insect pressure and no-insect pressure conditions. However, the impact of reverse gene flow may be limited because RF1 hybrid seeds presented lower seed shattering, and therefore most of it would be harvested by combine harvester. Nevertheless, our study revealed that gene flow from three weedy rice accessions to T1c-19 could produce RF1 hybrids with greater composite fitness. Any loss of seeds into agroecosystem may result in a greater risk of RF1 hybrids due to their morphological similarity and high fitness.
Keywords: Transgenes, T1c-19, Weedy rice, Gene Flow, F1 hybrids, fitness, Herbicide-resistance
Received: 07 Nov 2024; Accepted: 12 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Xie, Shen, Wang, Li, Huang, Qiang, Song and Dai. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Xiaoling Song, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, China
Wei-Min Dai, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, China
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