Feng Zhang, William J. Haun, Benjamin Clasen, Thomas Stoddard, Zachary Demorest, Jin Li, Song Luo, Dan Voytas and Luc Mathis
Cellectis plant sciences, New Brighton, Minnesota, USA
The burgeoning demand for plant-derived products, such as food, feed, fuel and fiber, underlies the importance of methods to continuously improve crop varieties with higher yields, lower input costs and better nutrition value. Recent advances in precise genome editing open up new opportunities to develop novel crop varieties with valuable traits. Precise genome editing often require targeted cleavage of specific chromosomal sequences, which generates single or double strand DNA breaks and activates endogenous DNA repair pathways. To date, four classes of programmable sequence-specific nucleases, meganuclease (homing endonuclease), zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcriptional activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)/CRISPRS-associated protein 9 (Cas9) nuclease, have been developed to cleave almost any sequences in any species. In this study, TALEN technology is employed to edit complex crop genomes. High frequency of gene editing events have been identified from a number of crop species, such as soybean, potato and canola. High value traits generated through this technology and their regulatory status will be presented.