OpenPlant researchers publish review of multi-gene engineering in plants with RNA-guided Cas9 nuclease

OpenPlant PI Nicola Patron and Oleg Raitskin (Earlham Institute, Norwich) have published a review on genome editing with RNA-guided Cas9 nuclease in plants, and the opportunities for multi-gene engineering.

Raitskin, O. and Patron, N.J., 2016. Multi-gene engineering in plants with RNA-guided Cas9 nuclease. Current Opinion in Biotechnology 37, p 69-75.

Highlights

  • RNA-guided Cas9 nucleases have been employed for genome editing in several plant species.
  • Several strategies for simultaneous expression of multiple sgRNAs have been demonstrated.
  • Parallel DNA assembly methods enable rapid construction of vectors for plant genome editing.

The use of RNA-guided Cas9 endonuclease for the concurrent engineering of multiple genes has been demonstrated in a number of plant species. Although Cas9 is a large monomeric protein, the single guide RNA (sgRNA) that directs it to a specific DNA target sequence is small and easy to reprogram. It is therefore relatively simple to produce numerous sgRNAs to target multiple endogenous sequences. Several approaches to express multiple sgRNAs and Cas9 in plants for the purpose of simultaneous editing or transcriptional regulation of many genes have recently been reported.

For more information see the full article.