Abstract
The CRISPR/Cas9 system has recently been engineered to confer resistance to geminiviruses in plants. However, we show here that the usefulness of this antiviral strategy is undermined by off-target effects identified by deep sequencing in Arabidopsis. We construct two virus-inducible CRISPR/Cas9 vectors that efficiently inhibit beet severe curly top virus (BSCTV) accumulation in both transient assays (Nicotiana benthamiana) and transgenic lines (Arabidopsis). Deep sequencing detects no off-target effect in candidate sites of the transgenic Arabidopsis. This kind of virus-inducible genome-editing system should be widely applicable for generating virus-resistant plants without off-target costs.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 197 |
| Journal | Genome biology |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 15 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by grants from the National Transgenic Science and Technology Program (2016ZX08010-002, 2018ZX0800102B-001 and 2018ZX0801002B-002), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31788103), and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (QYZDY-SSW-SMC030 and GJHZ1602).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Author(s).
Keywords
- CRISPR/Cas9 system
- Geminivirus
- Off-target
- Virus-inducible
- Virus-resistance