Abstract

Research on a few model plant–pathogen systems has benefitted from years of tool and resource development. This is not the case for the vast majority of economically and nutritionally important plants, creating a crop improvement bottleneck. Cassava bacterial blight (CBB), caused by Xanthomonas axonopodis pv. manihotis (Xam), is an important disease in all regions where cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) is grown. Here, we describe the development of cassava that can be used to visualize one of the initial steps of CBB infection in vivo. Using CRISPR-mediated homology-directed repair (HDR), we generated plants containing scarless insertion of GFP at the 3’ end of CBB susceptibility (S) gene MeSWEET10a. Activation of MeSWEET10a-GFP by the transcription activator-like (TAL) effector TAL20 was subsequently visualized at transcriptional and translational levels. To our knowledge, this is the first such demonstration of HDR via gene editing in cassava.

Details

Title
Gene tagging via CRISPR-mediated homology-directed repair in cassava
Author
Veley, Kira M 1 ; Okwuonu, Ihuoma 2 ; Jensen, Greg 1 ; Yoder, Marisa 1 ; Taylor, Nigel J 1 ; Meyers, Blake C 3 ; Bart, Rebecca S 1 

 Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Saint Louis, MO 63132, USA 
 Biotechnology Research Division, National Root Crops Research Institute, Umudike, Abia State, Nigeria 
 Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Saint Louis, MO 63132, USA; Division of Plant Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA 
Publication year
2021
Publication date
Apr 2021
Publisher
Oxford University Press
e-ISSN
21601836
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
3169740645
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Genetics Society of America. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.