Aregawi K, Shen J, Pierroz G, Sharma MK, Dahlberg J, Owiti J, Lemaux PG. Morphogene-assisted transformation of Sorghum bicolor allows more efficient genome editing.
Plant Biotechnol J 2022;
20:748-760. [PMID:
34837319 PMCID:
PMC8989502 DOI:
10.1111/pbi.13754]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 18] [Impact Index Per Article: 9.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/15/2021] [Revised: 11/12/2021] [Accepted: 11/15/2021] [Indexed: 05/08/2023]
Abstract
Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench, the fifth most important cereal worldwide, is a multi-use crop for feed, food, forage and fuel. To enhance the sorghum and other important crop plants, establishing gene function is essential for their improvement. For sorghum, identifying genes associated with its notable abiotic stress tolerances requires a detailed molecular understanding of the genes associated with those traits. The limits of this knowledge became evident from our earlier in-depth sorghum transcriptome study showing that over 40% of its transcriptome had not been annotated. Here, we describe a full spectrum of tools to engineer, edit, annotate and characterize sorghum's genes. Efforts to develop those tools began with a morphogene-assisted transformation (MAT) method that led to accelerated transformation times, nearly half the time required with classical callus-based, non-MAT approaches. These efforts also led to expanded numbers of amenable genotypes, including several not previously transformed or historically recalcitrant. Another transformation advance, termed altruistic, involved introducing a gene of interest in a separate Agrobacterium strain from the one with morphogenes, leading to plants with the gene of interest but without morphogenes. The MAT approach was also successfully used to edit a target exemplary gene, phytoene desaturase. To identify single-copy transformed plants, we adapted a high-throughput technique and also developed a novel method to determine transgene independent integration. These efforts led to an efficient method to determine gene function, expediting research in numerous genotypes of this widely grown, multi-use crop.
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