Male‐sterile maize plants produced by targeted mutagenesis of the cytochrome P450‐like gene (MS26) using a re‐designed I–CreI homing endonuclease

The I-CreI homing endonuclease from Chlamydomonas reinhardti has been used as a molecular tool for creating DNA double-strand breaks and enhancing DNA recombination reactions in maize cells. The DNA-binding properties of this protein were re-designed to recognize a 22 bp target sequence in the 5th exon of MS26, a maize fertility gene. Three versions of a single-chain endonuclease, called Ems26, Ems26+ and Ems26++, cleaved their intended DNA site within the context of a reporter assay in a mammalian cell line. When the Ems26++ version was delivered to maize Black Mexican Sweet cells by Agrobacterium-mediated transformation, the cleavage resulted in mutations at a co-delivered extra-chromosomal ms26-site in up to 8.9% of the recovered clones. Delivery of the same version of Ems26 to immature embryos resulted in mutations at the predicted genomic ms26-site in 5.8% of transgenic T(0) plants. This targeted mutagenesis procedure yielded small deletions and insertions at the Ems26 target site consistent with products of double-strand break repair generated by non-homologous end joining. One of 21 mutagenized T(0) plants carried two mutated alleles of the MS26 gene. As expected, the bi-allelic mutant T(0) plant and the T(1) progeny homozygous for the ms26 mutant alleles were male-sterile. This paper described the second maize chromosomal locus (liguless-1 being the first one) mutagenized by a re-designed I-CreI-based endonuclease, demonstrating the general utility of these molecules for targeted mutagenesis in plants.