Crop Biotech Update

Novel CRISPR-Cas9 System Isolates Transgene-free Rice Crops

February 14, 2024

Scientists from China produced a novel CRISPR-Cas9 system that can be used for cross-generational editing of rice. The system also helps with the isolation of transgenic-free crops.

CRISPR-Cas9 has been widely used around the world for crop genetic improvement because of its simplicity, stability, and efficiency. However, the CRISPR-Cas9 elements in the mutated offspring may cause unpredictable and unstable phenotypes, which can cause issues in commercial and research applications. Usually, transgene-free offspring are separated from edited ones using labor-intensive and time-consuming techniques.

Researchers from the Hunan Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Hunan University developed the fluorescence marker and pollen killer-assisted CRISPR-Cas9 system (FMPKC) to address the issue. The FMPKC system used a DsRed2 fluorescence marker to identify transgenic offspring and a pollen killer (RAmy1A or orfH79) to enhance the amount of non-transgenic seeds. The results showed that the system is ideal for multi-gene editing and it demonstrates great potential in functional genomics and improvement of rice breeding.

Read the article in the Plant Biotechnology Journal for more information.


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