Mobilized Transposable Elements As a Tool for Crop Improvement

The rapidly changing climate puts commonly used crop plants under strong pressure. It is therefore essential to develop novel breeding technologies to rapidly enhance crops to better withstand newly emerging stresses.

Interestingly, a clear link between transposable elements (TEs), crop improvement and varietal diversification exists. Furthermore, in recent years the importance of (TEs) in evolution and adaptation to stresses has been recognized. However, the use of TEs in crop breeding is currently very limited because it is currently very difficult to trigger TE mobility. We have now identified a novel highly conserved epigenetic silencing mechanism that represses the activity of TEs in Arabidopsis. Based on these findings we developed a drug treatment capable of inhibiting this mechanism thus allowing us to generate controlled TE bursts in Arabidopsis. Because these drugs target highly conserved enzymes we could also mobilize TEs in rice. We are therefore able to produce TE bursts in a controlled manner in virtually any plant. We can thus, for the first time, generate and study TE bursts in crop plants in real time.

The described approach thus unlocks the use of TEs in plant breeding in virtually any crop irrespective of the availability of its genome sequence.