TALEN-mediated bar-knockout Rice Production and Transcriptome Profiling

Gene editing technologies such as transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated 9 (Cas9) systems have been developed to create targeted DNA mutagenesis in many crop plants. This report describes application of the TALEN system to generate bialaphos resistance (bar)-knockout null segregants in herbicide-tolerant rice (Ba15) and microarray analysis on transcriptome changes of mutated lines, to identify unexpected effects resulting from off-targets. We generated 41 T0 plants and identified TALEN-mediated bar sequence mutations in 14 of them. Non-target site single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and small insertion/deletions (InDels) accounted for a large proportion of the mutations. Segregations of phosphinothricin acetyltransferase (PAT) protein expression levels were observed in T1 generations of two lines, R6 and R9. In addition, most T1 offspring harbored the TALE-R expression cassette and acquired some de novo mutations that were not inherited from their T0 parents. Three bar-knockout T1 lines were tested for PAT protein expression in progeny seedlings, and their T2 plants possessed inactive bar. We selected three bar-knockout T2 plants that were TALE-DNA-free for microarray analysis, aiming to understand the transcriptome differences between mutated null segregants and their recipient line. Only 31 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified in the bar-knockout rice lines, possibly resulting from somaclonal variations from the in vitro cell culture process. Taken together, TALEN-mediated bar mutations have little effect on the whole transcriptome profile of rice. We believe our results will be helpful to study unexpected consequences in gene-edited crops.