
Researchers Fine Tune the Ability of Agrobacterium to Engineer Plants and Fungi
November 13, 2024 |
A research team from the lab of Patrick Shih, an investigator at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) at UC Berkeley, the Deputy Vice President of the Feedstocks Division, and the Director of Plant Biosystems Design at Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), made simple changes to Agrobacterium to improve the efficiency of introducing DNA into a genome.
Based on previous literature, the research team hypothesized that engineering plasmids with higher copy numbers could lead to more efficient Agrobacterium-mediated transformation (AMT). The team examined four origins of replication used in AMTs, engineered random mutations, and applied a directed evolution assay to select variants with higher copy numbers.
Shih explained that, after identifying mutations, the team confirmed that several of these changes indeed increased the copy number. They then incorporated these optimized plasmids into the binary vector used by Agrobacterium to transfer DNA into the plant genome. The team said that the efficiency of transformation was improved by up to 100% in plants and 400% in fungi.
“Hopefully plant scientists will look at this and say, maybe there's more that we should be thinking about when we try to optimize these systems and maybe we can now use this tool set to begin tinkering in other species to see what works best,” said Matthew Szarzanowicz, first author of the study.
For more information, read the press release from IGI.
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