TAL effector-DNA specificity

authored by

Heidi Scholze, Jens Boch

Abstract

TAL effectors are important virulence factors of bacterial plant pathogenic Xanthomonas, which infect a wide variety of plants including valuable crops like pepper, rice and citrus. TAL proteins are translocated via the bacterial type III secretion system into host cells and induce transcription of plant genes by binding to target gene promoters. Members of the TAL effector family differ mainly in their central domain of tandemly arranged repeats of typically 34 amino acids each with hypervariable di-amino acids at positions 12 and 13. We recently showed that target DNArecognition specificity of TAL effectors is encoded in a modular and clearly predictable mode. The repeats of TAL effectors feature a surprising one-repeat-to-one-bp correlation with different repeat types exhibiting a different DNA base pair specificity. Accordingly, we predicted DNA specificities of TAL effectors and generated artificial TAL proteins with novel DNA recognition specificities. We describe here novel artificial TALs and discuss implications for the DNA recognition specificity. The unique TAL-DNA binding domain allows design of proteins with potentially any given DNA recognition specificity enabling many uses for biotechnology.

External Organisation(s)

Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

Type

Article

Journal

Virulence

Volume

1

Pages

428-432

No. of pages

5

ISSN

2150-5594

Publication date

01.09.2010

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Parasitology, Microbiology, Immunology, Microbiology (medical), Infectious Diseases

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.4161/viru.1.5.12863 (Access: Open)