AlphaFold‐Guided Bespoke Gene Editing Enhances Field‐Grown Soybean Oil Contents
Enhancing the oil or protein content of soybean, a major crop for oil and protein production is highly desirable. GmSWEET10a encodes a sugar transporter that is strongly selected during domestication and breeding, increasing seed size and oil content. GmSWEET10b is functionally similar to GmSWEET10a, yet has not been artificially selected. Here, AlphaFold is used to find that C-terminal variants of GmSWEET10a can endow enhanced or reduced transport activity. Guided by AlphaFold, the functionality is improved for GmSWEET10a in terms of oil content through gene editing. Furthermore, novel GmSWEET10b haplotypes possessing strengthened or weakened sugar-transport capabilities that are absent in nature are engineered. Consequently, soybean oil content or protein content in independent GmSWEET10b gene-edited lines during multi-year and multi-site field trials is consistently increased, without negatively affecting yield. The study demonstrates that the combination of AlphaFold-guided protein design and gene editing has the potential to generate novel beneficial alleles, which can optimize protein function in the context of crop breeding.
Authors
- Pingping Gong (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7057-7943)
- Shaodong Zhou
- Arnav Paul
- Xianjin Wu
- Long Yan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9713-5950)
- Nathan C. Tvedt
- Diwakar Shukla (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4079-5381)
- Li ZHANG (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7913-8093)
- Yuefeng Guan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1436-3828)
- Maoxiang Yang
- Zhenghua Du
- Huangliang ren (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-4181-1794)
- Huaqin Kuang
- Jiayi Sun (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3598-9528)
- Xiaolei Shi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7078-8057)
- Xin Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8051-1481)
- Jie Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3895-8527)
- Zhihui Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0635-6297)
- Mengyan Bai (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-9766-8528)
- Yonghui Dong
- Meina Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6294-7193)
- Shoudong Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1730-0267)
- Suning Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-0573-5756)
Institutions
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Guangzhou University (CN)
- Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology (CN)
- Hebei Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences (CN)
- Jiangxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CN)
- Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Advanced Science
- Published
- 2025-05-14
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202500290
- Citations
- 15
- Primary Topic
- Plant Virus Research Studies
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 26.25
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province
- Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
- National Key Research and Development Program of China
- Youth Innovation Promotion Association