Scientists Silence the Expression of Celiac Disease-causing Protein in Bread Wheat

Celiac disease (CD) is a digestive ailment that causes inability to absorb nutrients and poses immune response to gluten proteins present in wheat, barley and rye. The reaction is controlled by a group of white blood cells called T cells, which detects the presence of gluten. This disease is genetic, and the only treatment is to strictly abstain from eating food containing gluten. This led Javier Gil-Humanes of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC), Spain, and other scientists to use RNA interference (RNAi) to reduce the expression of gluten in bread wheat. They constructed a set of RNA sequences that makes a tight hairpin turn and expressed in the endosperm of bread wheat to silence the expression of gluten.

The researchers observed that the expression of gluten was significantly reduced in the transgenic lines of bread wheat. The total gluten produced were extracted and tested for ability to react with T cell clones from CD patients. For the five transgenic lines, there was a 10-100 times decrease in the amount of antigenic determinants produced. The total gluten extracts failed to react with T cell for three of the transgenic lines, and reduced responses were observed in another three transgenic lines. Therefore, reduction in the expression of gluten by RNAi can be used to produce wheat lines with low levels of toxicity for CD patients.

Read the open-access research article at http://www.pnas.org/content/107/39/17023.full.