Researchers Develop Pale Purplish-Pink Petunia via CRISPR-Cas9

Hanyang University scientists developed a pale purplish-pink Petunia using CRISPR-Cas9. Their findings are published in Plant Cell Reports.

The research team performed site-specific mutagenesis in Petunia to change the flower color. The commercial Petunia cultivar ‘Madness Midnight' has been known to have two F3H coding genes and thus they designed one guide RNA that targets both F3H genes at once. This resulted in 67 plants regenerated from Cas9-RNP transfected protoplasts. Then they obtained seven mutant lines with mutations in either F3HA or F3HB gene and one complete mutant line having mutations in both genes without any selectable markers. Only the f3ha f3hb showed a clearly modified, pale purplish-pink flower color, while the others had purple-violet flowers similar to the wild-type Petunia.

Read more findings in Plant Cell Reports.