Zhan Li^1,2 , Yajie Wang² , Xiaohua Lu² , Ruimei Li² , Jiao Liu² , Shaoping Fu² , Xinwen Hu¹ , Jianchun Guo² , Yuan Yao²

1 Institute of Tropical Agriculture and Forestry, Hainan University, Haikou, 570228
2 Key Laboratory of Biology and Genetic Resources of Tropical Crops, Ministry of Agriculture, Institute of Tropical Bioscience and Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences, Haikou, 571101
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Plant Breeding, 2020, Vol. 11, No. 17   doi: 10.5376/mpb.2020.11.0017
Received: 21 Aug., 2020    Accepted: 23 Aug., 2020    Published: 04 Sep., 2020

This article was first published in Molecular Plant Breeding in Chinese, and here was authorized to translate and publish the paper in English under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Li Z., Wang Y.J., Lu X.H., Li R.M., Liu J., Fu S.P., Hu X.W., Guo J.C., and Yao Y., 2020, Construction and verification of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing vector for cassava MeSSIII gene, Molecular Plant Breeding, 11(17): 1-8 (doi: 10.5376/mpb.2020.11.0017)

Starch glucan chain structure of cassava root is the key factor to determine starch quality. Soluble starch synthase III (SSIII) is the key enzyme to regulate the synthesis of long chain in plant amylopectin glucan. Cassava has two MeSSIII homologous genes MeSSIII-1 and MeSSIII-2. To study the effect of cassava MeSSIII on the quality formation of cassava root starch, a double gene editing vector for MeSSIII-1 and MeSSIII-2 was constructed. The sgRNA target for MeSSIII-1 and MeSSIII-2 was designed simultaneously by online software CRISPR-Pv2.0 based on the conserved segments, and the recombinant pCAMBIAP1301-Cas9-MeSSIII-gRNA plasmid was constructed by digestion and ligation. The gene editing vector was transformed into LBA4404 Agrobacterium competent cells and used to infect the friable embryogenic callus of cassava, and the their DNA was extracted. The target segments of MeSSIII-1 and MeSSIII-2 were amplified by PCR for Sanger sequencing, and analyzed the editing of target position. The results showed that the target sites of MeSSIII-1 and MeSSIII-2 were successfully edited. This study helps to further obtain mutants of the MeSSIII gene to analyze the role of this gene in the cassava starch synthesis pathway.

Cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz); Starch synthase; MeSSIII; CRISPR