With the goal of reducing the time and cost it takes to bring an improved crop to the marketplace to improve agriculture sustainability, research conducted in the laboratory of Keith Slotkin, PhD, and with his collaborator, Veena Veena, PhD, director of the Plant Transformation Facility, was recently published in the scientific journal Nature.
With the goal of reducing the time and cost it takes to bring an improved crop to the marketplace to improve agriculture sustainability, research conducted in the laboratory of Keith Slotkin, PhD, and with his collaborator, Veena Veena, PhD, director of the Plant Transformation Facility, was recently published in the scientific journal Nature. The publication Transposase-assisted target site integration for efficient plant genome engineering focuses on technology called TATSI (Transposase-Assisted Target Site Integration), which uses transposable elements to integrate custom DNA into specific sites in plant genomes.
The TATSI technology takes advantage of over two billion years of evolution of plant transposable elements, which naturally function as honed molecular machines to insert DNA into the genome. The high-frequency and high-precision target site integration of custom DNA into plant genomes enables the faster and less expensive production of gene-edited plants to address global challenges in agriculture, climate and the environment.
A critical bottleneck in modern crop improvement is the low frequency and error-prone integration of foreign DNA into the plant genome, hampering genome editing approaches for crop improvement. The CRISPR/Cas system functions like a pair of molecular "scissors" to cut the genome and introduce site-specific changes to the DNA. But current methods lack robust ways to add custom DNA accurately and efficiently at those edited sites. TATSI technology takes advantage of the molecular “glue” feature of transposable elements to provide custom "cut-and-paste" genome editing when combined with CRISPR/Cas. The “scissors + glue” combination enables an order-of-magnitude increase in the rate of targeted DNA integration in plant genomes, allowing for custom improvement of plants through the addition of important traits such as virus resistance, elevated nutrient levels, or better oil composition.
Read more at Donald Danforth Plant Science Center
Photo Credit: Catkin via Pixabay
