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Gene editing technologies have revolutionized the field of genetics, allowing researchers to make targeted changes to the DNA of various animal and plant nuclei, animal mitochondria, plant chloroplasts, and more. Missing from this list until recently, however, was plant mitochondrial DNA. The tools for delivering the necessary editing enzymes to plant mitochondria simply hadn’t been built.
Now, plant molecular biologist Shin-ichi Arimura of the University of Tokyo and colleagues have filled this gap, creating plant-friendly mitoTALENs—mitochondria-targeting gene editing tools based on transcription activator-like editing nucleases (TALENs).
“This is an important paper—it’s the first demonstration that we can make targeted and heritable changes to mitochondrial DNA” in plants, Ian Small, a plant scientist at the University of Western Australia who was not involved in the research, writes in an email to The Scientist.
Regular TALENs are composed of a DNA binding domain that can be readily engineered ...
