Project coordinator:

CNRGV
Hélène BERGES

Project partners:

INRA - LIPM
Stéphane Munos
Nicolas Langlade
24 chemin de Borde Rouge
31326 Castanet Tolosan
Email : stephane.munos@inra.fr

LAAS - CNRS
Aurélien Bancaud
7, avenue du colonnel Roche
31077 Toulouse
Email : abancaud@laas.fr

Abstract:

Agricultural research must deal with major issues on various scales, in light of the changing climatic and demographic context, where energy resources are limited. In this context of a need for improvement and adaptation of plants, genomic exploration is one of the strategic approaches of choice. Indeed, genomics will allow to define the gene content, their organization, their biological function and their variability between the different varieties. This knowledge facilitate the identification of interesting plant genes, which can play a role in biotic or abiotic resistance, in yield or in the quality process. However, the exploration of plant genome can be challenging  due to the complexity of plant genomes in terms of size, repetitive elements content and various levels of ploidy.
Linking a phenotype to a genomic region is crucial to better understand biological process. However, these approaches are still based on the study of the whole genome. Most research projects require a reliable  sequence of the region of interest genetically characterized or to be able to explore these regions on a larger population of individuals.
To meet these expectations, the CATCHMI project aims at developing a new approach to capture specific genomic regions of interest. This innovative strategy is based on the CRISPR / Cas9 (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology. Indeed, this technique used in vitro can be an effective means of targeting, excising and characterizing a specific region of a genome. This CRISPR-CATCH method was tested on a bacterial genome  (Jiang et al., 2015). We'll develop this approach on large and complex plant genome regions in Sunflower.

CNRGV's responsible

• Carine Satgé

CNRGV involvement

• Development of this new approach.

YouTube : https://youtu.be/PWy7SZl0MW8