The plant AlcR-pAlcA ethanol-inducible system displays gross growth artefacts independently of downstream pAlcA-regulated inducible constructs

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 11; no. 1; p. 2142
• Main Author: Randall, Ricardo S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 25-01-2021; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 631/136; 631/1647; 631/1647/1511; 631/1647/1513; 631/449; Ethanol; Humanities and Social Sciences; multidisciplinary; Phenotypes; Science; Science (multidisciplinary)
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-80903-z

The AlcR fungal protein responds to ethanol and binds to the fungal
pAlcA
promoter in its presence. This system was transferred to plants over twenty years ago and was claimed to function in the same manner in plants. However, never has the control experiment with plants containing the
AlcR
gene alone, with no downstream inducible construct, been made. In this paper, I conduct several experiments with this control, growing
p35:AlcR
plants in the presence or absence of ethanol. I found that when these plants were grown in the presence of ethanol, growth in several tissues and several stages of growth was retarded. This demonstrates that this system is not suitable for use in the plant sciences, and casts doubt on the conclusions of papers that have published phenotypes using this system.