CRISPR/Cas9 induces exon skipping that facilitates development of fragrant rice.

Abstract

Splicing of precursor-mRNAs (pre-mRNAs) is a critical biological process of gene expression. Normally, pre-mRNAs are processed by spliceosomes to produce mature mRNAs by removing introns at 5'-(donor) and 3'-(acceptor) splice sites based on the canonical GU-AG rule (Reddy et al., 2013). Mutation at either the intron donor or acceptor sites should cause mRNA mis-splicing. Recently, an exon skipping method has been developed to generate loss of gene function in mammalian cells using base editors to mutate nucleotides at the acceptor sites (Gapinske et al., 2018).