Applications of CRISPR/Cas9 as New Strategies for Short Breeding to Drought Gene in Rice

• Published in: Frontiers in plant science 2022-02, Vol.13, p.850441-850441
• Main Authors: Park, Jae-Ryoung, Kim, Eun-Gyeong, Jang, Yoon-Hee, Jan, Rahmatullah, Farooq, Muhammad, Ubaidillah, Mohammad, Kim, Kyung-Min
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: abiotic stress; agricultural trait; generation; OsSAP; Plant Science; reactive oxygen species
• ISSN: 1664-462X; 1664-462X
• DOI: 10.3389/fpls.2022.850441

Recent unpredictable climate change is the main reason for the decline in rice yield. In particular, drought stress is a major constraint in reducing yield and quality for rice at rainfed agriculture areas, such as Asia and South America. CRISPR/Cas9 provides an effective solution for gene function study and molecular breeding due to specific editing of targeted genome sequences. In addition, CRISPR/Cas9 application can significantly reduce the time required to develop new cultivars with improved traits compared to conventional complex and time-consuming breeding. Here, drought-induced gene ( ) was edited by CRISPR/Cas9. To investigate the possible role of in drought stress, genome-editing plants were subjected to drought stress until the soil moisture content reached 20%, and the reactive oxygen species (ROS) scavenging efficiency of genome-editing plants were decreased. When the genome-editing plants were subjected to drought stress, survival rate, shoot length, root length, content of chlorophyll number of tiller, and 1,000-grain weight decreased, and more H O and O were detected in leaves. In addition, expression levels of several critical stress-related transcription factors were decreased in the genome-editing plant. These results suggest that function as a positive regulator during drought stress response in rice. We analyzed the expression of and in T and T plants as well as T seeds. As the course of generation advancement progressed, expression remained stable or weakened but the expression was continuously removed from the T plant. The coefficient of variation (CV) in both T plants and T seeds was lower than 5%. Overall, our results suggest that CRISPR/Cas9 could be a novel and important tool for efficiently generating specific and inheritable targeted genome editing in rice, with short breeding cycles.