title: Lessons from Domestication: Targeting Cis-Regulatory Elements for Crop Improvement.
abstract: Domestication of wild plant species has provided us with crops that serve our human nutritional needs. Advanced DNA sequencing has propelled the unveiling of underlying genetic changes associated with domestication. Interestingly, many changes reside in cis-regulatory elements (CREs) that control the expression of an unmodified coding sequence. Sequence variation in CREs can impact gene expression levels, but also developmental timing and tissue specificity of expression. When genes are involved in multiple pathways or active in several organs and developmental stages CRE modifications are favored in contrast to mutations in coding regions, due to the lack of detrimental pleiotropic effects. Therefore, learning from domestication, we propose that CREs are interesting targets for genome editing to create new alleles for plant breeding.
authors.affiliation: Department of Plant Systems Biology, VIB, Technologiepark 927, B-9052 Gent, Belgium; Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Ghent University, Technologiepark 927, B-9052 Gent, Belgium.
authors.forename: Gwen
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Swinnen
authors.affiliation: Department of Plant Systems Biology, VIB, Technologiepark 927, B-9052 Gent, Belgium; Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Ghent University, Technologiepark 927, B-9052 Gent, Belgium. Electronic address: algoo@psb.vib-ugent.be.
authors.forename: Alain
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Goossens
authors.affiliation: Department of Plant Systems Biology, VIB, Technologiepark 927, B-9052 Gent, Belgium; Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Ghent University, Technologiepark 927, B-9052 Gent, Belgium. Electronic address: lapau@psb.vib-ugent.be.
authors.forename: Laurens
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Pauwels
mesh_terms: D018556:Crops, Agricultural / Q000235:genetics*; D000071278:Domestication; D000072669:Gene Editing / Q000379:methods / Q000639:trends; D018506:Gene Expression Regulation, Plant; D053263:Gene Regulatory Networks; D010641:Phenotype; D050436:Regulatory Elements, Transcriptional / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: CRISPR; microRNA; new breeding techniques; non-coding; pleiotropy; transcription factor