Abstract
Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is one of the most important crops in the world for its fruit production. Advances in cutting-edge techniques have enabled the development of numerous critical traits related to the quality and quantity of tomatoes. Genetic engineering techniques, such as gene transformation and gene editing, have emerged as powerful tools for generating new plant varieties with superior traits. In this study, we induced parthenocarpic traits in a population of elite tomato (ET) lines. At first, the adaptability of ET lines to genetic transformation was evaluated to identify the best-performing lines by transforming the SlANT1 gene overexpression cassette and then later used to produce the SlIAA9 knockout lines using the CRISPR/Cas9 system. ET5 and ET8 emerged as excellent materials for these techniques and showed higher efficiency. Typical phenotypes of knockout sliaa9 were clearly visible in G0 and G1 plants, in which simple leaves and parthenocarpic fruits were observed. The high efficiency of the CRISPR/Cas9 system in developing new tomato varieties with desired traits in a short period was demonstrated by generating T-DNA-free homozygous sliaa9 knockout plants in the G1 generation. Additionally, a simple artificial fertilization method was successfully applied to recover seed production from parthenocarpic plants, securing the use of these varieties as breeding materials.
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The data used in this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Funding
This work was supported by the Key Research Funding Program of Vietnam National University of Agriculture (T2018-12-06 TĐ), National Research Foundation of Korea (2019H1D3A1A01102938, 2022R1A2C3010331, 2020R1A6A1A03044344, 2021R1A5A8029490), and the Program for New Plant Breeding Techniques (NBT, PJ01686702), Rural Development Administration (RDA), Korea.
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C.C.N. and J.-Y.K. conceived the idea and designed the experiments. C.C.N. designed experiments, performed experiments, analyzed data, and wrote the manuscript; C.C.N., T.V.V., and N.N.T. performed the experiments; R.M.S. and W.-Y.K. contributed to the interpretation and draft of the output; R.M.S., J.-Y.K., T.D.K, and W.-Y.K. revised the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Nguyen, C.C., Van Vu, T., Shelake, R.M. et al. Generation of parthenocarpic tomato plants in multiple elite cultivars using the CRISPR/Cas9 system. Mol Breeding 44, 13 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11032-024-01452-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11032-024-01452-1