For the first time, rapid domestication of wild plants is achieved through gene editing.

Domestication is a kind of progressive behavior with the development of human civilization, crop domestication enables human beings to transform wild plants into cultivated crops with stable production of food, but with the deepening of domestication and improvement, the genetic diversity of crops and resistance to biological and non-biological stress gradually decrease, and resistance to retrograde breeding encounters bottlenecks. in order to improve the resistance of crops, the
, traditional breeding through hybridization of wild species of the resistance into the cultivation of species, this way takes many years, and often accompanied by chain burden, resulting in the introduction of resistance to reduce the yield or quality of crops.
in recent years, global climate change has led to rising temperatures, created many new pests and extreme weather, and crops face increasing challenges of adversity, which urgently need new and more precise crop improvement strategies to address these challenges in order to ensure human food security.
based on people's understanding of the genetic and molecular laws of crop domestication, using gene editing techniques to domesticate wild plants with natural resistance is a new strategy for obtaining resistant crops.
, in collaboration with Xu Chao Research Group of the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the High Color Xia Research Group, selected the basic materials of the natural salt-resistant base and solanum pimpinellifolium, and used gene editing techniques to accurately target the coding and regulatory areas of multiple yield and quality control genes, without sacrificing their natural resistance to saline and sore disease.
researchers used a multi-target CRISPR/Cas9 vector system to accurately target the coding regions of the flowering light cycle sensitivity, plant and fruit synchronous ripening control genes SP and SP5G (Coding region), fruit size control genes SlCLV3 and SlWUS, and vitamin C Upstream Open Open Reading Box (upstream Open Fragment Reading, uORF), the synth gene gene gene-editing strain of the synthetic enzyme gene SlGGP1, obtained 140 independent gene editing strains, and the genetic and phenotype identification of the descendant population showed that gene editing eliminated the light cycle sensitivity of wild tomato flowering, broke through the geographical limit of the plant, and achieved the first step in the domestication of wild plants.
also transforms the currant tomato blossoming late,fruit-scented Indeterminate strain into a compact strain of "double-limited" growth, improving fruit sitting rate, fruit ripening synchronization and harvest index.
and the editing of the normal regulatory element of the small peptide gene SlCLV3 and its signal inglisive gene SlWUS downstream and the open reading box upstream of SlGGP1 made the wild tomato fruit larger and the vitamin C content increased.
salt treatment and the test of scabies vaccination showed that the precise import ation of the above-mentioned important agronomic traits did not affect the natural resistance of wild tomatoes.
the study is the first to achieve rapid domestication of wild plants through gene editing, providing new strategies for precise design and creation of new crops.
the results were published on October 1 in the journal Nature Biotechnology (DOI: 10.1038/nbt.4273).
research paper entitled Domestication of wild is sed edby by the genome.
the institute's doctoral students Li Hudong, Yu Yu and postdoctoral yang Xinping are the co-authors of the paper, and researcher Xu Chao and Gao Caixia are the co-authors of the paper.
the research was funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Chi-Chi Program of the Central Group, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Key Laboratory of Plant Genomics.
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