Scientists Build 'Speed Scanner' to Test Thousands of Plant Gene Switches at Once

By Aliyah Kovner

Agriculture, from the outset, has been made possible by humans tweaking the genes of plants to make them grow faster, produce more of what we want, and survive drought, pests, and infection. For millennia, we did it with selective breeding. More recently, we advanced to genetic engineering. But even with today’s ultra-fast sequencing technologies and streamlined CRISPR-based gene editing tools, successfully altering a plant is a slow, laborious process.

Scientists at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) are helping to change that with a new technology called ENTRAP-seq, which can screen thousands of transcription regulators for plants, simultaneously. Transcriptional regulators are proteins that impact how a gene is expressed like a dimmable light switch; they can turn it off entirely or change how much of a specific product a cell makes by modulating how often the DNA is transcribed into RNA. Most of the enhanced traits we see in current crop and biofuel species are the result of transcription modulation, for example, thousands of years ago, ancient farmers bred natural variants of wheat that had higher expression of genes controlling grain size. Agricultural technology scientists would love to better wield these genetic switches, yet our understanding of them is limited, despite extensive studies of plant genomes.

“Even for the well-studied plants – where we know a ton about which genes control which things, and in many cases, how the gene works – it’s not clear how to alter gene expression to make beneficial modifications,” said Simon Alamos, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley and JBEI, a Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Research Center managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Alamos is co-first author on a study describing ENTRAP-seq now published in Nature Biotechnology. “We want to be able to use the plants’ own transcription regulators, and proteins with this activity from other organisms like plant viruses, but until now, we didn’t have a way to predict what they do or test them quickly.”