CRISPR/Cas9 has emerged as the most important tool for genome engineering due to its simplicity, design flexibility, and high efficiency. This technology makes it possible induce point mutations in one or some target sequences simultaneously, well introduce new genetic variants by homology-directed recombination. However, this approach remains largely unexplored forest species. In study, we rep...

Virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) is a valuable tool for identification and characterization of genes function. To improve the efficiency of VIGS in different organ, we developed an organ-specific VIGS that could be applied to tomato (Solanum lycopersicum cv Micro Tom) leaves, flowers and fruits respectively. With phytoene desaturase (PDS) as a reporter gene, almost up to 100% of efficiency o...

Genome editing is a powerful technique for genome modification in molecular research and crop breeding, and has the great advantage of imparting novel desired traits to genetic resources. However, the genome editing of fruit tree plantlets remains to be established. In this study, we describe induction of a targeted gene mutation in the endogenous apple phytoene desaturase (PDS) gene using the ...

RNA silencing is a sequence-specific RNA degradation process that follows the recognition of double-stranded RNA. Here, we show that virus vectors carrying parts of a green fluorescent protein (GFP) transgene targeted RNA silencing in Nicotiana benthamiana and Arabidopsis against the entire GFP RNA. These results indicate that there was spreading of RNA targeting from the initiator region into ...

Controlling gene expression during plant development is an efficient tool to explore gene function. In this paper, we describe a gene expression system driven by a heat-shock gene promoter (HSP18.2), to trigger the expression of an intron-containing inverted-repeat. RNA interference became a powerful way for gene functional analysis by reverse genetic approaches. However, constitutive gene sile...

The nuclear-encoded, thylakoid-bound early light-inducible protein (ELIP) reported to be related to the initial stages of chloroplast differentiation is synthesized in substantial amounts in leaves of mature plants exposed to light stress conditions (Adamska, I., Ohad, I., and Kloppstech, K. (1992b) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 89, 2610-2613). Increase in ELIP content correlates with the photo...