Development of approaches for genome editing of pea plants using CRISPR/Cas9 prime-editing technique

Abstract

Mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) play an important role as intracellular regulators of signal pathways in plants. Some MAPKs have been shown to be induced in the roots of legume plants during symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing rhizobial bacteria. One of such signal regulators, MAPK6, was shown to be involved in the development of symbiosis betweenPisum sativumL. pea plants and rhizobia. Using genetic engineering approaches, we overexpressed theMAPK6gene in transgenic roots, that resulted in an increase in the number of nodules and the biomass of pea plants. New approaches for genome editing of pea plants have been designed using the CRISPR/Cas9 prime-editing technique, when theMAPK6gene was used as a target. We have analyzed the transgenic roots of pea transformants and observed the presence of the gene encoding Cas9 the pegRNA sequence in the genome of transformants. Therefore, the possibility of using genetic engineering methods to obtain plants with increased efficiency of symbiosis will be investigated in future experiments.