Abstract
Salinity is one of the most important abiotic stress affecting the world rice production. The cultivation of salinity-tolerant cultivars is the most cost-effective and environmentally friendly approach for salinity control. In recent years, CRISPR/Cas9 systems have been widely used for target-site genome editing; however, their application for the improvement of elite rice cultivars has rarely been reported. Here, we report the improvement of the rice salinity tolerance by engineering a Cas9-OsRR22-gRNA expressing vector, targeting the OsRR22 gene in rice. Nine mutant plants were identified from 14 T0 transgenic plants. Sequencing showed that these plants had six mutation types at the target site, all of which were successfully transmitted to the next generations. Mutant plants without transferred DNA (T-DNA) were obtained via segregation in the T1 generations. Two T2 homozygous mutant lines were further examined for their salinity tolerance and agronomic traits. The results showed that, at the seedling stage, the salinity tolerance of T2 homozygous mutant lines was significantly enhanced compared to wild-type plants. Furthermore, no significantly different agronomic traits were found between T2 homozygous mutant lines and wild-type plants. Our results indicate CRISPR/Cas9 as a useful approach to enhance the salinity tolerance of rice.
Highlights
The global crop production needs to double by 2050 to match the demands of the rapidly increasing population, changing diet, and increasing biofuel consumption (Ray et al 2013)
This study first reports the improvement of salinity tolerance via CRISPR/Cas9-targeted mutagenesis of the transcription factor OsRR22
The binary plasmid Cas9-OsRR22gRNA (Fig. 1 b) was constructed based on the CRISPR/Cas9 vector previously described by Ma et al (2015a)
Summary
The global crop production needs to double by 2050 to match the demands of the rapidly increasing population, changing diet, and increasing biofuel consumption (Ray et al 2013). Abiotic stress, which includes drought, salinity, low temperature, heat, flooding, and oxidative stress, severely limits the feasible yield increase, or even reduces crop production in large areas (Mahajan and Tuteja 2005). Among these abiotic stress, salinity poses one of the major threats to crop production since most crop plants cannot grow under a high concentration of salt (Munns and Tester 2008). Soil salinity is hard to remove, which will cause a continuous decrease in crop production for many years. Over 400 million hectares of land throughout the world have been affected by salinity
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