Compositional equivalency of RNAi-mediated virus-resistant transgenic soybean and its nontransgenic counterpart

RNA silencing or RNA interference (RNAi), which is triggered by double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), is an evolutionarily conserved process that is active in a wide variety of eukaryotic organisms. Engineering plants with hairpin construct in which the viral gene is arranged in inverted repeats (IR) renders plants resistant to plant virus infection. However, there is no report on whether biologically important changes occurred by the insertion of IR, which confer transgenic plants virus resistance. In the present study, the compositions of virus-resistant transgenic soybean seeds developed by insertion of three short IRs, each containing the specific, highly conserved sequences derived from one virus, were compared with those of nontransgenic counterparts by applying the principle of substantial equivalence to determine whether significant undesirable biological changes occurred by IR insertion. The results revealed that the nutrient components as well as antinutrient contents of these virus-resistant soybean lines are substantially equivalent to those of the nontransgenic counterparts, and the majority of the measured amounts of nutritional components and antinutrient contents are well within the range of values reported for other commercial soybean lines. The results imply that no biologically important changes occurred by the insertion of IRs in the RNAi-mediated virus-resistant transgenic soybeans. The results can serve as baseline information for developing RNAi-mediated transgenic soybean cultivars or other crops with broader spectrum virus resistance.