PhD project title:

Use of in vivo gene editing tools to control plant development

Principal Supervisor:

Dr Stephen Jackson (School of Life Sciences)

Second Supervisors:

Dr Yiguo Hong (Life Sciences & Hangzhou University)

Where will the student be based? Warwick School of Life Sciences

Project description:

For many years it has been possible to manipulate aspects of plant development through the creation of transgenic plants expressing exogenous genes, however it has always been a long-term goal to do this by altering endogenous genes without the need for transgenic plants. Recently technologies have been developed that now enable gene-editing of endogenous genes, such techniques include Zinc finger nucleases, TALENs, and the more recent CRISPR RNA gene editing system (Cong et al. 2013, de Souza 2013). We will investigate the possibility of using such systems, particularly the CRISPR system, to alter the sequences of genes involved in the control of flowering in order to manipulate the flowering time of crop plants.

We have a virus-based expression system which we have already used successfully to express functional proteins in tobacco plants (Li et al. 2009). We are testing whether this expression system can be used to deliver the gene-editing proteins/RNA into plant cells and to create gene-edited plants. Other approaches such as expression in plant protoplasts followed by regeneration of gene-edited plants will also be tested. If such approaches are successful then this will revolutionize the way in which genetically modified plants are produced, enabling them to be produced without the need to incorporate any foreign DNA into their genome.

Key experimental skills involved:

Plant physiological assays

Molecular biological techniques including gene expression analysis (Real-time PCR)

Bioinformatics

References:

Cong, L., Ran, F. A., Cox, D., Lin, S., Barretto, R., Habib, N., ... & Zhang, F. (2013). Multiplex genome engineering using CRISPR/Cas systems. Science, 339(6121), 819-823.

de Souza, N. (2013). Genetics: RNA-guided gene editing. Nature Methods, 10(3), 189-189.

Li, C., Zhang, K., Zeng ,X., Jackson, S., Zhou, Y., and Y. Hong (2009). A cis-element within FLOWERING LOCUS T mRNA determines its mobility and facilitates trafficking of heterologous viral RNA. J.Virology 83:3540-3548.

Contact details for application enquiries:

Dr Stephen Jackson
E-mail:

Keywords: Gene expression, molecular biology, plants, flowering, crop, gene-editing