Rijk Zwaan Breeding Plant iPS regeneration tool

Plants have a remarkable regenerative capacity, but it varies widely among species and tissue types. This regenerative recalcitrance can be particularly distressing for the application of modern plant propagation and breeding techniques if it concerns important crop cultivars. Regeneration generally involves empirically determined tissue culture methods based on the principle of totipotency. Tissue explants undergo a two-step hormonal treatment by manipulating the cytokinin ratio to auxin in the cultures culminating in shoot formation. Experiments in Arabidopsis demonstrate that during these steps, cells are first persuaded to change fate towards root stem cell-like identity and subsequently are reprogrammed to acquire shoot fate (Sugimoto et al. 2010) The knowledge on root stem cell niche biology will be applied to directly use the implicated stem cell factors as a tool to induce stemness and regeneration in a way similar to the principles of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) in the animal field. The work that has been done so far in Arabidopsis and tomato has led to a patent application (WO2019/211296A1). With this tool, we aim to elucidate new molecular mechanisms involved in regeneration and try to develop tailored protocols for hormone-induced regeneration