Can We Use Gene-Editing to Induce Apomixis in Sexual Plants?
1
Simons Center for Quantitative Biology, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724, USA
2
Department of Systematics, Biodiversity and Evolution of Plants, Albrecht-von-Haller Institute for Plant Sciences, University of Goettingen, Untere Karspuele 2, 37073 Goettingen, Germany
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Genes 2020, 11(7), 781; https://doi.org/10.3390/genes11070781
Received: 17 June 2020
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Revised: 8 July 2020
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Accepted: 9 July 2020
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Published: 12 July 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Molecular Basis of Apomixis in Plants)
Apomixis, the asexual formation of seeds, is a potentially valuable agricultural trait. Inducing apomixis in sexual crop plants would, for example, allow breeders to fix heterosis in hybrid seeds and rapidly generate doubled haploid crop lines. Molecular models explain the emergence of functional apomixis, i.e., apomeiosis + parthenogenesis + endosperm development, as resulting from a combination of genetic or epigenetic changes that coordinate altered molecular and developmental steps to form clonal seeds. Apomixis-like features and synthetic clonal seeds have been induced with limited success in the sexual plants rice and maize by using gene editing to mutate genes related to meiosis and fertility or via egg-cell specific expression of embryogenesis genes. Inducing functional apomixis and increasing the penetrance of apomictic seed production will be important for commercial deployment of the trait. Optimizing the induction of apomixis with gene editing strategies that use known targets as well as identifying alternative targets will be possible by better understanding natural genetic variation in apomictic species. With the growing availability of genomic data and precise gene editing tools, we are making substantial progress towards engineering apomictic crops.
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Keywords:
apomeiosis; character segregation; crop biotechnology; heterosis; meiosis; molecular breeding; recombination
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MDPI and ACS Style
Scheben, A.; Hojsgaard, D. Can We Use Gene-Editing to Induce Apomixis in Sexual Plants? Genes 2020, 11, 781. https://doi.org/10.3390/genes11070781
AMA Style
Scheben A, Hojsgaard D. Can We Use Gene-Editing to Induce Apomixis in Sexual Plants? Genes. 2020; 11(7):781. https://doi.org/10.3390/genes11070781
Chicago/Turabian StyleScheben, Armin, and Diego Hojsgaard. 2020. "Can We Use Gene-Editing to Induce Apomixis in Sexual Plants?" Genes 11, no. 7: 781. https://doi.org/10.3390/genes11070781
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