Glufosinate chemically resembles the amino acid glutamate and acts to inhibit an enzyme, called glutamine synthetase, which is involved in the synthesis of glutamine. Essentially, glufosinate acts enough like glutamate, the molecule used by glutamine synthetase to make glutamine, that it blocks the enzyme's usual activity. Glutamine synthetase is also involved in ammonia detoxification. The presence of glufosinate results in reduced glutamine levels and a parallel increase in concentrations of ammonia in plant tissues. This leads to cell membrane disruption and cessation of photosynthesis resulting in plant withering and death.

Glufosinate tolerance in this maize line is the result of introducing the bar gene encoding the enzyme phosphinothricin-N-acetyltransferase (PAT) isolated from the common aerobic soil actinomycete, Streptomyces hygroscopicus. The PAT enzyme catalyzes the acetylation of phosphinothricin, detoxifying it into an inactive compound. The PAT enzyme is not known to have any toxic properties.

The male-sterile trait was introduced by inserting the barnase gene, isolated from Bacillus amyloliquefaciens, a common soil bacterium that is frequently used as a source for industrial enzymes. The barnase gene encodes for a ribonuclease enzyme (RNAse) that is expressed only in the tapetum cells of the pollen sac during anther development. The RNAse affects RNA production, disrupting normal cell functioning and arresting early anther development, thus leading to male sterility.

The introduced DNA also included the barstar gene from B. amyloliquefaciens that encodes a specific inhibitor of the barnase RNAse. The barstar gene was included to prevent the RNAse from disrupting the development of bacteria in which the introduced DNA was prepared.

Two antibiotic resistant genes were also introduced into this LMO: the beta-lactamase gene (bla) and chloramphenicol acetyl transferase (cat) genes, encoding resistance to the antibiotics ampicillin and chloramphenicol, respectively. These were included as selectable marker genes to identify bacteria transformed with recombinant plasmids. The expression of these three genes (barstar, bla, and cat) was regulated by bacterial promoters that are not active in plants.