Abstract:

To meet the growing demand for food from human being, the study on editing important gene-coding regions to produce beneficial traits is countless. Transcriptional regulation is crucial for controlling gene expression, including the control of important agronomic traits in crops. The interaction between cis-acting elements and trans-acting factors determines the spatiotemporal expression patterns and levels of genes, and transcription factor binding sites and enhancers etc. play an important role in those pathways. What's more, the promoter, as the largest and most important cis-acting element, can be modified to alter the expression patterns of target genes, and create beneficial traits in crops, which is an effective strategy different from coding region editing breeding. There are two applications of promoter editing strategies. One is directed modification to generate specific beneficial traits, and the other is to randomly generate new alleles within specific promoter regions, followed by phenotypic selection, also producing new genetic variation resources. In this review, we mainly discuss the application of promoter editing in crops, including increasing yield, improving quality, and enhancing tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses. It aims to focus on the cutting-edge precision breeding of crops, providing research ideas and theoretical references for the development and application of promoter gene editing technology.

Key words: promoter editing, cis-acting elements, crop breeding