Herbicide tolerance and gene silencing stability over generations in the ricin bio-detoxicated castor bean.

Castor bean (Ricinus communis L.) is an important cultivated oilseed. Seeds contain ricinoleic acid, a valuable product for a variety of industries. Castor cake is a residue of ricinoleic manufacture and could be used as animal feed due to its high amount of protein. However, castor cake contains ricin and RCA120, both highly toxic and allergenic proteins. In 2017, we reported the development of a transgenic event (named TB14S-5D) with an undetectable amount of ricin/RCA120. In the present work, we evaluate TB14S-5D for tolerance to the herbicide imazapyr, as it contains the selectable marker gene, ahas, which was previously isolated from Arabidopsis thaliana and contains a mutation at position 653 bp. In addition, we demonstrated that the ricin coding genes are stably silenced over three generations.