Rapid production of novel beneficial alleles for improving rice appearance quality by targeting a regulatory element of SLG7

作者：Wenchen Tan, Jun Miao, Bo Xu, Chuting Zhou, Yirui Wang, Xueqi Gu, Shuainan Liang, Baoxiang Wang, Chen Chen, Jinyan Zhu, Shimin Zuo, Zefeng Yang, Zhiyun Gong, Aiqing You, Shujun Wu, Guohua Liang, Yong Zhou · 发表于：Plant Biotechnology Journal · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1111/pbi.14041 · 被引用次数：42 · 研究领域：Genetic Mapping and Diversity in Plants and Animals、GABA and Rice Research、Rice Cultivation and Yield Improvement

Rice, an important food crop consumed by more than half of the world's population, is also a tradeable commodity. The appearance quality of rice, characterized by grain shape, chalkiness, transparency and colour, greatly influences its commercial value. Generally, varieties with slender grains are associated with good appearance quality (Zhao et al., 2022). Several quantitative trait loci (QTL) for slender grains have been cloned and characterized (Liu et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2015a,b; Zhao et al., 2018). We previously characterized a major QTL for grain shape, slender grain on chromosome 7 (SLG7; Zhou et al., 2015), which is allelic to GL7 and GW7 (Wang et al., 2015a,b). Highly-expressed alleles of SLG7/GL7/GW7 produce slender grains with low chalkiness. SLG7 is valuable in breeding because it has few negative effects on grain yield-related traits. Although the beneficial SLG7 alleles might be introduced by traditional breeding to improve grain appearance, this process would typically take years. Here, we describe a rapid strategy to enhance rice appearance quality by editing the SLG7 promoter via CRISPR/Cas9. We predicted some cis-regulatory elements of the SLG7 promoter using Plant-CARE (Lescot et al., 2002; Figure 1a). To investigate which regulatory element is responsible for SLG7 expression, five target sites (T1–T5) near the predicted elements were selected for gene editing (Figure 1a). These five constructs were independently transformed into Wuyunjing30 (WYJ30), a ...