Assessing the efficacy of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in the wheat pathogen Parastagonspora nodorum.

Background: The genome-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 has revolutionized gene manipulation by providing an efficient method to generate targeted mutations. This technique deploys the Cas9 endonuclease and a guide RNA (sgRNA) which interact to form a Cas9-sgRNA complex that initiates gene editing through the introduction of double stranded DNA breaks. We tested the efficacy of the CRISPR/Cas9 approach as a means of facilitating a variety of reverse genetic approaches in the wheat pathogenic fungus Parastagonospora nodorum.

Results: Parastagonospora nodorum protoplasts were transformed with the Cas9 protein and sgRNA in the form of a preassembled ribonuclear protein (RNP) complex targeting the Tox3 effector gene. Subsequent screening of the P. nodorum transformants revealed 100% editing of those mutants screened. We further tested the efficacy of RNP complex when co-transformed with a Tox3-Homology Directed Repair cassette harbouring 1 kb of homologous flanking DNA. Subsequent screening of resulting transformants demonstrated homologous recombination efficiencies exceeding 70%. A further transformation with a Tox3-Homology Directed Repair cassette harbouring a selectable marker with 50 bp micro-homology flanks was also achieved with 25% homologous recombination efficiency. The success of these homology directed repair approaches demonstrate that CRISPR/Cas9 is amenable to other in vivo DNA manipulation approaches such as the insertion of DNA and generating point mutations.

Conclusion: These data highlight the significant potential that CRISPR/Cas9 has in expediting transgene-free gene knockouts in Parastagonospora nodorum and also in facilitating other gene manipulation approaches. Access to these tools will significantly decrease the time required to assess the requirement of gene for disease and to undertake functional studies to determine its role.