Use of designer nucleases for targeted gene and genome editing in plants

Abstract

Summary The ability to efficiently inactivate or replace genes in model organisms allowed a rapid expansion of our understanding of many of the genetic, biochemical, molecular and cellular mechanisms that support life. With the advent of new techniques for manipulating genes and genomes that are applicable not only to single‐celled organisms, but also to more complex organisms such as animals and plants, the speed with which scientists and biotechnologists can expand fundamental knowledge and apply that knowledge to improvements in medicine, industry and agriculture is set to expand in an exponential fashion. At the heart of these advancements will be the use of gene editing tools such as zinc finger nucleases, modified meganucleases, hybrid DNA/RNA oligonucleotides, TAL effector nucleases and modified CRISPR/Cas9. Each of these tools has the ability to precisely target one specific DNA sequence within a genome and (except for DNA/RNA oligonucleotides) to create a double‐stranded DNA break. DNA repair to such breaks sometimes leads to gene knockouts or gene replacement by homologous recombination if exogenously supplied homologous DNA fragments are made available. Genome rearrangements are also possible to engineer. Creation and use of such genome rearrangements, gene knockouts and gene replacements by the plant science community is gaining significant momentum. To document some of this progress and to explore the technology's longer term potential, this review highlights present and future uses of designer nucleases to greatly expedite research with model plant systems and to engineer genes and genomes in major and minor crop species for enhanced food production.

Biallelic Gene Targeting in Rice

“…Since the first publication reporting plant genome editing using CRISPR/Cas9 in 2013, this system has been applied to several plant species, including Arabidopsis, potato, soybean, tobacco, tomato, maize, rice, sorghum, and wheat, suggesting its broad applicability (for a review, see Weeks et al, 2015). Following the discovery that induction of a DSB increases the frequency of HDR by several orders of magnitude, SSNs have emerged as the strategy of choice for improving the efficiency of HDR-mediated genetic alterations.…”

Screening of Oryza sativa L. for Hpt Gene and Evaluation of Hpt Positive Samples Using Houba Retransposon-Based IRAP Markers

“…This antibiotic is much more effective than kanamycin for the selection of transformed rice tissues (Christou and Ford, 1995). Zuraida et al (2013) Weeks et al, 2016). Especially CRISPR/Cas9 system has been used for genome editing in major crops such as rice (Zhang et al, 2014;Xu et al, 2015) maize (Feng et al, 2016) and wheat (Shan et al, 2014).…”

Genome Editing in Plants: An Overview of Tools and Applications

“…Such a chimeric protein has a modular structure, because each of the "zinc finger" domains recognizes one triplet of nucleotides. This method became the basis for the editing of cultured cells, including model and nonmodel plants [4,5].…”