Publications
Sensitive detection of pre-integration intermediates of long terminal repeat retrotransposons in crop plants
Retrotransposons have played an important role in the evolution of host genomes1,2. Their impact is mainly deduced from the composition of DNA sequences that have been fixed over evolutionary time2. Such studies provide important ‘snapshots’ reflecting the historical activities of transposons but do not predict current transposition potential. We previously reported sequence-independent retrotransposon trapping (SIRT) […]
Domestication of wild tomato is accelerated by genome editing
Crop improvement by inbreeding often results in fitness penalties and loss of genetic diversity. We introduced desirable traits into four stress-tolerant wild-tomato accessions by using multiplex CRISPR–Cas9 editing of coding sequences, cis-regulatory regions or upstream open reading frames of genes associated with morphology, flower and fruit production, and ascorbic acid synthesis. Cas9-free progeny of edited […]
Rice in vivo RNA Structurome Reveals RNA Secondary Structure Conservation and Divergence in Plants
RNA secondary structure plays a critical role in gene regulation. Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is one of the most important food crops in the world. However, RNA structure in rice has scarcely been studied. Here, for the first time we have successfully generated in vivo Structure-seq libraries in rice. We found that the structural flexibility […]
Ubiquitylation Activates a Peptidase that Promotes Cleavage and Destabilization of Its Activating E3 Ligases and Diverse Growth Regulatory Proteins to Limit Cell Proliferation in Arabidopsis
The characteristic shapes and sizes of organs are established by cell proliferation patterns and final cell sizes, but the underlying molecular mechanisms coordinating these are poorly understood. Here we characterize a ubiquitin-activated peptidase called DA1 that limits the duration of cell proliferation during organ growth in Arabidopsis thaliana. The peptidase is activated by two RING […]
