GENE EDITING AND CISGENESIS OF RESISTANCE GENES TO PRODUCE LATE BLIGHT RESISTANT POTATO

In potato production, the introduction of late blight disease resistant cultivars could reduce the need for chemical fungicide treatment massively, save money and safeguard the environment. Traditional breeding has sought to generate sustainable resistant table potato cultivars for almost a century.

However, no major cultivar with stacked resistance genes exists on the table potato market because of gene drag with negative traits, which are difficult to resolve by traditional breeding.

New genetic tools based on CRISPR-Cas have been used to engineer a “clean” DNA sequence in some crops but not yet in potato. Applying CRISPR-Cas could enable the creation of transgene-free genetically edited resistant crops.

Therefore, the aim of the present project is to develop a CRISPR-Cas system to engineer resistance genes at three levels for generating resistance potato cultivars that may not need to classified as GMO in the near future: 1. A system that allows insertion of three resistant genes into a safe harbor locus for creating cisgenesis crops; 2.

A method for replacement of one non-functional gene by one functional resistance gene homolog; 3. Identification of the point mutations of one resistance gene and repair them by editing short DNA sequences.

The study will allow provide new types of late blight disease resistant plants of popular cultivars as well as a new method for gene replacement that could be used to recover other types of disease resistance and other crops.