Investigating the increase of oleic acid in safflower plant by changes in Fatty Acid Desaturase-2 gene after using CRISPR-Cas9 method

Safflower with low oleic acid content is one of the native plants of Iran. Generally,, high oleic acid oils have more oxidative stability than the oils with high linoleic acids . Genome editing technology enable us to obtain oilseeds with high oleic acid. In this research, two guide RNA sequences were designed to target of Fatty Acid Desaturase 2 (FAD2-1) gene, which were located within the coding region and at a distance of 640 base pairs from each other. The guide sequences along with the codon optimized Cas9 gene were cloned in the T-DNA region of the Agrobacterium construct and transferred to the safflower by the In-planta method. The resulting seeds were cultivated and the plants were screened to track changes in the fatty acid profile of the seeds. The results showed that the amount of oleic acid in the seeds of one of the lines reached 53.14% on average. This line had four amino acid changes (L66F, N204D, S236A and I238V) at the same time. This is while the amount of oleic acid in the control plant was measured as 11.62% on average. The results showed that in the segregating generation, the change in fatty acid profile occurred in the line with homozygous amino acid change, and the heterozygous plants have the same oil profile as the control plants. Also, the results of this research can indicate the possibility of increasing the amount of oleic acid in oilseeds by changing the FAD2 enzyme sequence and without gene knockout.