Cell—Engineering Quantitative Trait Variation for Crop Improvement by Genome Editing——SUMMARY

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SUMMARY

Major advances in crop yields are needed in the coming decades. However, plant breeding is currently limited by incremental improvements in quantitative traits that often rely on laborious selection of rare naturally occurring mutations in gene-regulatory regions.Here, we demonstrate that CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing of promoters generates diverse cis-regulatory alleles that provide beneficial quantitative variation for breeding. We devised a simple genetic scheme, which exploits trans-generational heritability of Cas9 activity in heterozygous loss-of-function mutant backgrounds, to rapidly evaluate the phenotypic impact of numerous promoter variants for genes regulating three major productivity traits in tomato: fruit size, inflorescence branching, and plant architecture. Our approach allows immediate selection and fixation of novel alleles in transgene-free plants and fine manipulation of yield components. Beyond a platform to enhance variation for diverse agricultural traits, our findings provide a foundation for dissecting complex relationships between gene-regulatory changes and control of quantitative traits.

未来的几十年在作物产量上需要取得重大进展。然而，植物育种目前受到数量性状不断改良的限制，因为这些数量性状往往依赖于对基因调控区域稀有的自然发生的突变的大量筛选。本文，我们表明对启动子的CRISPR/Cas9基因组编辑产生了多样化的顺式调控区域的等位基因，这些等位基因提供了对育种有益的定量突变。我们设计了一个简单遗传流程。这个流程利用了在杂合的失去功能的突变体背景下的反式跨代遗传的Cas9的活性，这个流程能快速评价那些调控3个重要产量性状的基因的大量的启动子上的突变的表型影响。果实大小，花序分支和植株形状。我们的方法允许在没有转基因标签的植株中直接选择和固定新的等位基因，并且能对产量的各个元素进行精细调控。超越这个平台去增强农艺性状多样性的变异，我们的发现提供了一个解析数量性状的基因调控变化和调控之间的复杂关系。