Application of protoplast technology to CRISPR/Cas9 mutagenesis: From single cell mutation detection to mutant plant regeneration

Plant protoplasts are useful for assessing the efficiency of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR Associated Protein 9 (Cas9) mutagenesis. We improved the process of protoplast isolation and transfection of several plant species. We also developed a simple method to isolate and regenerate single mutagenized Nicotianna tabacum protoplasts into mature plants. Following transfection of protoplasts with constructs encoding Cas9 and sgRNAs, target gene DNA could be amplified for further analysis to determine mutagenesis efficiency. We investigated N. tabacum protoplasts and the derived regenerated plants for targeted mutagenesis of the phytoene desaturase (NtPDS) gene. Genotyping of albino regenerants indicated that all four NtPDS alleles were mutated in amphidiploid tobacco, and that no Cas9 DNA could be detected in the majority of the resulting plants.

 

同研究人員:Choung-Sea Lin