Abstract
CRISPR-Cas9 has become the preferred gene editing technology to obtain loss-of-function mutants in plants, and hence a valuable tool to study gene function. This is mainly due to the easy reprograming of Cas9 specificity using customizable small non-coding RNAs, and to the ability to target several independent genes simultaneously. Despite these advances, the identification of CRISPR-edited plants remains time and resource consuming. Here, based on the premise that one editing event in one locus is a good predictor of editing event/s in other locus/loci, we developed a CRISPR co-editing selection strategy that greatly facilitates the identification of CRISPR-mutagenized Arabidopsis plants. This strategy is based on targeting the gene/s of interest simultaneously with a proxy of CRISPR-Cas9-directed mutagenesis. The proxy is an endogenous gene whose loss-of-function mutation produces an easy-to-detect visible phenotype that is unrelated to the expected phenotype of the gene/s under study. We tested this strategy via assessing the frequency of co-editing of three functionally unrelated proxies. We found all three proxies predicted the occurrence of mutations in either or both of the other two proxies with efficiencies ranging from 40% to 100%, dramatically reducing the number of plants that need to be screened to identify CRISPR mutants. This selection strategy provides a framework to facilitate gene function studies of gene families as well as the function of single copy genes in polyploid plant species where the identification of multiplex mutants remains challenging.
Footnotes
Renyu Li; e-mail address: rl3dw{at}virginia.edu, Charles Vavrik; e-mail address: charlesvavrik{at}gmail.com