CRISPR-act-mediated synchronized activation of CsAlaDC and CsTSI enhances L-theanine biosynthesis in tea plants

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Zhejiang Science and Technology Major Program on Agricultural New Variety Breeding-Tea Plant (2021C02067), Central Public-interest Scientific Institution Basal Research Fund (1610212021002), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32494784), and the Elite Youth Program of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

Author contributions

J.H., X.W., X.Z., and Q.F. designed the experiments; X.Z., Q.F., X.D., Y.S., Y.H., Y.Y., J.F., M.Y., and C.D. performed experiments; X.H., L.W., N.L., and J.Z. provided valuable advice on the manuscript. X.Z., Q.F., and J.H. analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript.

Data availability

The data supporting the findings of this study have been deposited in ScienceDB and are accessible at https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.34912.

Conflicts of interest statement

No conflict of interests declared.

References

[1] Lin S, Chen Z, Chen T, et al. Theanine metabolism and transport in tea plants (Camellia sinensis L.): advances and perspectives . Crit Rev Biotechnol. 2022; 43: 1-15.

[2] Ma W, Kang X, Liu P, et al. The analysis of transcription factor CsHB1 effects on caffeine accumulation in tea callus through CRISPR/Cas9 mediated gene editing . Process Biochem. 2021; 101: 304-11.

[3] Ma H, Liu N, Sun X, et al. Establishment of an efficient transformation system and its application in regulatory mechanism analysis of biological macromolecules in tea plants. Int J Biol Macromol . 2023; 244: 125372.

[4] Pan C, Wu X, Markel K, et al. CRISPR-Act3.0 for highly efficient multiplexed gene activation in plants. Nat Plants. 2021; 7: 942-53.

[5] Zhu B, Guo J, Dong C, et al. CsAlaDC and CsTSI work coordinately to determine theanine biosynthesis in tea plants (Camellia sinensis L.) and confer high levels of theanine accumulation in a non-tea plant . Plant Biotechnol J. 2021; 19: 2395-7.