Defining the Parameters to Improve Plant Regeneration with Developmental Regulators

Abstract

Tissue culture methods which serve as the standard to regenerate modified plants are challenging and have limited the capacity to engineer new accessions. To improve upon these techniques, genome modifying reagents have been combined with developmental regulators to create gene edited plant tissues in both monocot and eudicot species. Co-culturing seedlings with Agrobacterium strains encoding developmental regulatory genes has proved to be effective at producing de novo meristems in multiple eudicot species. In order to see that this technology scales well beyond proof of concept experiments, various parameters were tested for refinement. Improvements have been observed at the key stages of growth induction and progression to shooting by manipulating the vector design, developmental regulator choice, Agrobacterium strain selection, and regulatory gene removal systems. Having defined these parameters as viable optimization points, the avenues to apply developmental regulators for plant regeneration in more diverse species have become more feasible.