CRISPR/Cas9 sisteminin markörsüz çeltik elde edilmesinde kullanımının gösterilmesi

There is a great demand for new high yield crop varieties due to increased world population. Use of molecular breeding tools has made the breeding process faster. However, transformation efficiency is very low in plants and therefore scientists use marker genes to differentiate the transformed cells or tissue. Marker genes code for a protein which confers resistance to antibiotics or herbicides. Since marker genes generally originate from bacterial sources there are many biosafety concerns about them. Due to these concerns, many scientists have been used numerous approaches to remove the marker gene from the transgenic plant genome. However, these approaches were time-consuming and had some drawbacks. Thus, there is a need for more simple methods. Here we attempted to remove NPT (Neomycin phosphotransferase) marker gene from transgenic rice genome by using CRISPR/Cas9 technology which is the newest member of site-specific nucleases. However, expected results have not been obtained due to the low transformation efficiency.