Congrats to Qingqing and the rest of the team! Check out our new paper showing plants can sense two seasons simultaneously to control growth and flowering.

Maybe the core problem isn't who is, as Thorp describes "performing the hard intellectual labor of choosing, from the mass of research, those discoveries that deserve publication in a top journal" but that they are doing this at all.

Does anyone know the record for the Arabidopsis plant with the most independent T-DNA insertions? Has someone made a octuple mutant by crossing or something?

Another year with no funding for plant biology from the #MarsdenFund

it is important to recognize that a high level of genomic disruption is inherent to the creation of transgenic plants. This is not an argument against their use, but I believe that we need to be upfront about the potential consequences of this technology

I think few plant scientists realize that 10–20% of transgenic plants have some sort of chromosomal translocation. Thus while there is a lot of discussion around the precision of contemporary gene editing tools ...

Agro is frequently used in Plant Sci to create transgenic plants. Yet, beyond expressing the genes on the T-DNA, how many pause to consider the effects of transgene insertion into the genome of a plant? We review this here: https://t.co/KCKEDKRDrQ #Plants #TDNA #Agrobacterium

Had a BLAST at the 2023 @MCDB_Yale retreat 🤩. Alongside my brilliant fellow Postdocs, @cintiasagawa and @GojThomson, we had the privilege of showcasing our incredible Citrus project, which aims to combat the #citrusgreening disease using gene editing.🍊

Thanks also to Holger Puchta for his News & Views article on the paper It was the Puchta lab who developed the IPGT method on which this work builds. https://t.co/lWd4HD7iWl

Once again, well done to Lauren and Wenxin! Here is the link again: https://t.co/1wRhySG5oD

There is still much to be explained. However I think its neat that despite being used as a tool for nearly 40 years, the mechanism of Agrobacterium mediated transformation is still throwing up cool new science.

But who wants concatenated transgenes anyway? Well, we go on to show that gene editing rates increase, and as we set out to do, gene targeting rates are increased too (4-fold!).

We favor an interpretation that it is the TMEJ pathway mediated by PolQ which is responsible. However this is hard to test directly given that PolQ is required for transgene integration via floral dip.

Quite mysterious!!! 🤨🤨🤨 We then went and tested this phenomenon in genetic backgrounds where DNA repair pathways are impaired. Notably, NHEJ and HDR seem not to be involved. However, this phenomenon is suppressed in mre11, rad17 and atr mutants

We then randomized these LTR sequences and bizarrely the same thing happened. So we used new random sequences... and it happened again, and again, and again.

... but this seems to have supercharged this phenomenon. We then dissected our transgene and found that the LTR sequences had the greatest contribution to this increase in concatenation. Makes some sense, these are repeated on the transgene.

While we did see an increase in copy number, which was promising, this turned out not to be attributable to retrotransposition. Instead it seems that T-DNA concatenation is the explanation. It is well understood that transgenes can concatenate to some degree ...

We were initially investigating whether inclusion of a retrotransposon sequence on a transgene would be useful for increasing donor template copy number for the purposes of gene targeting.

This is the work of graduate students Lauren Dickinson (recently graduated) and Wenxin Yuan! Also research associate Chantal LeBlanc helped a lot! https://t.co/1wRhySG5oD

🦠🌱🧬 - 🦠🌱🧬-🦠🌱🧬 New publication from the Jacob Lab @MCDB_Yale 🦠🌱🧬-🦠🌱🧬🦠🌱🧬 "Regulation of gene editing using T-DNA concatenation" #PlantScience #CRISPR #Agrobacterium