Building customizable auto-luminescent luciferase-based reporters in plants
- University of Minnesota, United States
- University of Washington, United States
Abstract
Bioluminescence is a powerful biological signal that scientists have repurposed as a reporter for gene expression in plants and animals. However, there are downsides associated with the need to provide a substrate to these reporters, including its high cost and non-uniform tissue penetration. In this work we reconstitute a fungal bioluminescence pathway (FBP) in planta using a composable toolbox of parts. We demonstrate that the FBP can create luminescence across various tissues in a broad range of plants without external substrate addition. We also show how our toolbox can be used to deploy the FBP in planta to build auto-luminescent reporters for the study of gene-expression and hormone fluxes. A low-cost imaging platform for gene expression profiling is also described. These experiments lay the groundwork for future construction of programmable auto-luminescent plant traits, such as light driven plant-pollinator interactions or light emitting plant-based sensors.
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All the data collected for this study is depicted in the figures included in the manuscript. All the raw data used to make the figures has been uploaded.
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Author details
Funding
University of Minnesota (Grand Challenges Postdoctoral Fellowship)
- Arjun Khakhar
National Institutes of Health (R01GM079712)
- Nayoung Lee
Rural Development Administration (PJ013386)
- Nayoung Lee
U.S. Department of Energy
- Colby G Starker
- James C Chamness
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, 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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Building customizable auto-luminescent luciferase-based reporters in plants
eLife 9:e52786.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.52786
