An effective and inexpensive strategy to identify multiplexCRISPR-edited plants
2019
Since its first introduction in 2013, CRISPR-Cas9 has
become the preferred gene targeting tool to produce
loss-of-function mutants in plants. In spite of the high
specificity and ease of use, the identification of CRISPR-edited
plants has remained a time consuming and onerous process. I have
developed and tested an easy-to-use and inexpensive strategy to
select for multiplex CRISPR mutagenized Arabidopsis plants. This
strategy is based on targeting the gene/s of interest
simultaneously with a proxy for CRISPR-Cas9 activity: an endogenous
gene that produces an easy-to-detect visible phenotype. To test
this strategy, I have chosen Arabidopsis gene JAR1, GL1, EIN2 as
the candidate proxies. I have tested the T2 progeny of independent
T1 plants harboring CRISPR/Cas9 and successfully identified plants
where the visible marker and the genes of interest were
simultaneously edited at a high frequency. The co-editing frequency
ranged from 55.6% to 93.75% for two genes, and 14.3% to 50% for
three genes, depending on the T1 progeny tested and the proxy gene
of choice. The visual phenotype selection provides a narrow pool of
plants to analyze, hence increasing the recovery frequency while
decreasing the cost of identifying mutants. This selection strategy
also offers a framework to similarly facilitate the identification
of CRISPR-edited plants in other plant species with more complex
polyploid genomes where multiplex mutants are essential for
studying gene function.
- Correction
- Source
- Cite
- Save
- Machine Reading By IdeaReader
0
References
0
Citations
NaN
KQI