Assessment of tobacco and N. benthamiana as biofactories of irregular monoterpenes for sustainable crop protection

<p>Irregular monoterpenes&nbsp;are&nbsp;important&nbsp;precursors of&nbsp;different&nbsp;compounds employed in pest control such as&nbsp;insecticides and&nbsp;insect&nbsp;sex&nbsp;pheromones.&nbsp;Metabolically&nbsp;engineered plants&nbsp;are appealing&nbsp;as&nbsp;biofactories&nbsp;of such compounds,&nbsp;but specially as&nbsp;potential&nbsp;live&nbsp;biodispensers&nbsp;of&nbsp;related&nbsp;bioactive&nbsp;volatiles,&nbsp;which could&nbsp;be&nbsp;continuously emitted&nbsp;to the environment&nbsp;from&nbsp;different&nbsp;plant tissues.&nbsp;Here&nbsp;we assess&nbsp;the&nbsp;use&nbsp;of&nbsp;cultivated&nbsp;tobacco and&nbsp;Nicotiana&nbsp;benthamiana&nbsp;as&nbsp;biofactories&nbsp;for&nbsp;the irregular monoterpenes&nbsp;chrysanthemol&nbsp;and&nbsp;lavandulol.&nbsp;We evaluate the impact of&nbsp;high levels&nbsp;of&nbsp;constitutive&nbsp;metabolite&nbsp;production&nbsp;on&nbsp;the&nbsp;plant physiology and biomass, and their biosynthetic dynamics for different plant tissues and developmental stages.&nbsp;As an example of an active&nbsp;pheromone compound,&nbsp;we&nbsp;super-transformed the best&nbsp;lavandulol-producing&nbsp;tobacco&nbsp;line with an acetyl transferase&nbsp;gene&nbsp;to&nbsp;obtain a tobacco&nbsp;lavandulyl&nbsp;acetate&nbsp;biodispenser&nbsp;producing up to&nbsp;0.63 mg&nbsp;of&nbsp;lavandulyl&nbsp;acetate&nbsp;per&nbsp;plant every day. We estimate that&nbsp;with these&nbsp;volatile emission&nbsp;levels,&nbsp;between&nbsp;200&nbsp;and&nbsp;500 plants per hectare&nbsp;would be sufficient&nbsp;to ensure a daily emission of pheromones comparable to commercial lures.&nbsp;This is&nbsp;an important step&nbsp;towards plant-based sustainable solutions for pest control, and&nbsp;it&nbsp;lays&nbsp;the ground&nbsp;for&nbsp;further&nbsp;developing&nbsp;biofactories&nbsp;for other irregular monoterpenoid pheromones, whose biosynthetic genes are yet unknown.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The dataset includes GC-MS data (peak areas quantified for each compound with its Qi, normalized) for all the figures and supplementary figures of the associated manuscript. Peak areas are normalized with an admixture, analyzed on the same day as the samples.</p> <p>It also includes biomass data and measurements for the analyzed plants (plant height, leaf biomass, days to flowering time).</p> <p>File S3 shows data for quantitative PCR to determine transgene copy number, and for qRT-PCR to measure transgene expression levels.</p> <p>For all datasets, statistical analysis is also included to support the conclusions showed in the graphs.</p>