One of the most significant factors that reduce the yield of plants is the lack of moisture. Under the conditions of climate change, drought and soil salinization will increase. In this regard, scientists are looking for ways to increase the stress resistance of plants.
Biologists from Tomsk State University, together with colleagues from the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Physiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, are doing this using genomic editing technologies, reports official website of Tomsk State University.
They modify agrobacteria and with their help provide plants with new properties.
– Modern agriculture is facing a drop in crop yields due to numerous adverse environmental factors. Water shortage, leading to drought and soil salinization, is becoming a global problem, - says Marina Efimova, researcher at the Department of Plant Physiology, Biotechnology and Bioinformatics of the TSU Biological Institute. – Previously, plant resistance was increased by selection methods, but this is a long-term process, which, like classical genetic engineering, is inferior in efficiency to genome editing.
The development of genetic engineering and genomic editing methods has made it possible to modify plant genes responsible for their resistance to stress factors. The project of biologists, implemented with the support of the Priority 2030 program, is aimed at finding key regulatory genes that determine plant tolerance to drought, salinity and damaging temperatures. Biologists use the CRISPR/Cas9 editing system as a tool to turn off genes.
A series of experiments was carried out by scientists on the plant Arabidopsis thaliana - this is a classic model object for research, the so-called "plant Drosophila".
The bacteria themselves do not change the economically valuable traits of the plant, but penetrating into the plants through the pollen tube, they transmit a DNA sequence that introduces a mutation in the plant gene chosen by the researcher. Seeds that mature after "dipping" are already different from the parent plant. In this way, it is possible to control the genes involved in the manifestation of plant responses to various stressful influences or to change any other properties. The researchers plan to conduct tests on rapeseed and flax plants.
Let us add that this study is pioneering – currently there are only a few reports on genome editing in rice, wheat and tomatoes.