Arabidopsis glutamate:glyoxylate aminotransferase 1 (Ler) mutants generated by CRISPR/Cas9 and their characteristics

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated 9 (CRISPR/Cas9) technology provides an efficient tool for editing the genomes of plants, animals and microorganisms. Glutamate:glyoxylate aminotransferase 1 (GGAT1) is a key enzyme in the photorespiration pathway; however, its regulation mechanism is largely unknown. Given that EMS-mutagenized ggat1 (Col-0 background) M2 pools have been generated, ggat1 (Ler background) should be very useful in the positional cloning of suppressor and/or enhancer genes of GGAT1. Unfortunately, such ggat1 (Ler) mutants are not currently available. In this study, CRISPR/Cas9 was used to generate ggat1 (Ler) mutants. Two GGAT1 target single-guide RNAs (sgRNAs) were constructed into pYLCRISPR/Cas9P₃₅S-N, and flowering Arabidopsis (Ler) plants were transformed using an Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated floral dip protocol. Eleven chimeric and two heterozygous GGAT1-edited T1 lines of target 1 were separately screened from positive transgenic lines. Two ggat1 homozygous mutants, CTC-deletion and T-deletion at target 1, were generated from T2 generations of the 13 T1 lines. The edited mutation sites were found to be stable through generations regardless of whether the T-DNA was present. In addition, the genetic segregation of the mutation sites obeyed the Mendelian single gene segregation rule, and no mutations were detected at the possible off-target site. Also, the two independent ggat1 mutants had similar photorespiration phenotypes and down-regulated GGAT enzyme activity. Together, these results indicate that genetically stable ggat1 (Ler) mutants were generated by CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing, and these mutants will be used to promote the positional cloning of suppressor and/or enhancer genes of GGAT1 in our subsequent study.