Synthetic hormone-responsive transcription factors can monitor and re-program plant development
- University of Washington, United States
Abstract
Developmental programs sculpt plant morphology to meet environmental challenges, and these same programs have been manipulated to increase agricultural productivity1,2. Hormones coordinate these programs, creating chemical circuitry3 that has been represented in mathematical models4,5; however, model-guided engineering of plant morphology has been limited by a lack of tools6,7. Here, we introduce a novel set of synthetic and modular hormone activated Cas9-based repressors (HACRs) in Arabidopsis thaliana that respond to three hormones: auxin, gibberellins and jasmonates. We demonstrate that HACRs are sensitive to both exogenous hormone treatments and local differences in endogenous hormone levels associated with development. We further show that this capability can be leveraged to reprogram development in an agriculturally relevant manner by changing how the hormonal circuitry regulates target genes. By deploying a HACR to re-parameterize the auxin-induced expression of the auxin transporter PIN-FORMED1 (PIN1), we decreased shoot branching and phyllotactic noise, as predicted by existing models4,5.
Data availability
Links to all plasmid sequences are in manuscript and data analysis code is available on github.
Article and author information
Author details
Jennifer L Nemhauser
Funding
National Science Foundation (MCB-1411949)
- Eric Klavins
National Institutes of Health (R01-GM107084)
- Jennifer L Nemhauser
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (Faculty Scholars Program)
- Jennifer L Nemhauser
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2018, Khakhar et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Synthetic hormone-responsive transcription factors can monitor and re-program plant development
eLife 7:e34702.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.34702
