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Updated: Aug 14, 2026

Breeding by Design for Functional Rice with Genome Editing Technologies
Published on: January 3, 2025
Site-specific DNA excision in transgenic rice with a cell-permeable cre recombinase
Ming-Xia Cao1, Jian-Qiu Huang, Quan-Hong Yao
1National Laboratory of Plant Molecular Genetics, Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology, Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200032, People's Republic of China.
Abstract:
The removal of selected marker genes from transgenic plants is necessary to address biosafety concerns and to carry out further experiments with transgenic organisms. In the present study, the 12-amino-acid membrane translocation sequence (MTS) from the Kaposi fibroblast growth factor (FGF)-4 was used as a carrier to deliver enzymatically active Cre proteins into living plant cells, and to produce a site-specific DNA excision in transgenic rice plants. The process, which made cells permeable to Cre recombinase-mediated DNA recombination, circumvented the need to express Cre under spatiotemporal control and was proved to be a simple and efficient system to achieve marker-free transgenic plants. The ultimate aim of the present study is to develop commercial rice cultivars free from selected marker genes to hasten public acceptance of transgenic crops.
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