ausblenden:
Schlagwörter:
-
Zusammenfassung:
To detect pathogens, plants employ Resistance (R) proteins, many of which have nucleotide binding and leucine rich repeat (NB-LRR or NLR) domains. The number of NLR genes varies greatly between plant genomes, from fewer than hundred to close to a thousand. In addition, individual NLR genes often vary considerably in sequence, likely both because alleles persist much longer than the genome average due to balancing selection, and because of rapid diversification due to positive selection. However, this is not true for all NLR genes, and about a fifth of all Arabidopsis thaliana NLR genes are highly conserved among accessions. For example, 32 out of 163 NLR genes show much less than diversity than the NLR family average, with ~90% or more of the reference gene sequence found in the first 80 A. thaliana accessions sequenced in the 1001 Genomes project. Out of these 32 genes, only two have been assigned a biological function from previous analysis of mutants or natural variants. The goal of our study is to explore the biological functions of these conserved NLR genes, using CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technology to systematically generate mutants and determine their mutant phenotypes both in normal growth condition and after pathogen infection.
