https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5710-3367
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Hiroki Tsutsui, Harnessing Virus Vectors for Heritable Tissue Culture-Free Gene Editing, Plant and Cell Physiology, Volume 65, Issue 11, November 2024, Pages 1740–1742, https://doi.org/10.1093/pcp/pcae131
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Since the advent of CRISPR technology, gene editing has been extensively used in a diverse range of living organisms including plants. The application of CRISPR has considerable potential for crops to add and enhance beneficial traits by altering their genetic or epigenetic profiles.
The most common approach for introducing transgenes, including gene-editing components, into plant cells is tissue culture-based transformation. However, this transformation method has some drawbacks. Only a limited variety of plant species can be transformed via tissue culture, and the processes involved, such as callus induction and shoot regeneration, are both time- and labor-intensive. Moreover, these operations can lead to undesirable somatic mutations.
As an alternative, researchers have explored methods to introduce transgenes by circumventing tissue culture-based transformation (Quiroz et al. 2024). One of the practical approaches is through the use of a virus vector that can be utilized for the expression of foreign genes. Specifically, some virus vectors are known to travel from infected tissues to distant tissues, and researchers have been seeking to apply this feature for gene editing (Mahmood et al. 2023). If the virus vector harboring CRISPR components is able to reach the shoot apical meristem (SAM), the genome of its germ cell lineage can be edited, and the edited genome will be inherited by subsequent generations, resulting in tissue culture-free heritable gene editing.
