Plant Plasmids and Resources
Background
Addgene’s repository contains many plasmid tools that were specifically designed for Plant Biology. These resources include tools for research using plant systems such as Arabidopsis, wheat, maize, rice, tomato, and a variety of other species. In addition to individual plasmids, Addgene carries several useful toolkits and plasmid collections for Plant Biology. Check out the Plant CRISPR and Plant SynBio collections!
The tables below highlight plasmids spanning a wide variety of molecular biology technologies: from genome engineering and gene regulation to fluorescent proteins. Addgene’s collection includes plasmids containing promoters that drive general and species-specific gene expression (see the column ‘promoter’ in the tables for species-specific tools).
Support open science in Plant Biology - deposit plant plasmids with Addgene!
CRISPR
Please refer to Addgene's CRISPR Guide for a general introduction to CRISPR technology or the Plant CRISPR resources for a full selection of plasmids expressing different functional variants of Cas9 and empty gRNA backbones.
A few examples of useful plant CRISPR resources include:
- A Multipurpose Toolkit that enables targeted, specific modification of monocot and dicot genomes using a variety of genome engineering approaches including TALENs and CRISPR. Validated in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum), Medicago truncatula, wheat (Triticum aestivum), and barley (Hordeum vulgare) - Daniel Voytas.
- Cas9 and gRNA backbone for use in Nicotiana benthamiana - Sophien Kamoun.
- Plant codon optomized Cas9 for use in Arabidopsis and Nicotiana benthamiana - Jen Sheen.
- pKIR Vectors for highly efficient CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene knockout in Arabidopsis thaliana - Tetsuya Higashiyama.
- A CRISPR/Cas9 toolkit for use in a variety of plant species (e.g. maize and Arabidopsis) and vectors for easy assembly of one or more gRNA expression cassettes - Qi-Jun Chen.
- Cas9 and gRNA backbone for use in rice - Yinong Yang. Includes a protocol for Targeted Gene Mutation in Rice.
- pDGE Dicot Genome Editing Kit for Golden Gate cloning-based assembly of constructs for CRISPR genome editing in dicotyledonous plants - Johannes Stuttmann.
- MoClo CRISPR/Cas Toolkit for Plants CRISPR/Cas nucleases, base editors, gRNA backbones, and promoters for expression in monocots and dicots - Vladimir Nekrasov.
- zCas9i cloning kit: MoClo-compatible CRISPR/Cas9 cloning kit with intronized Cas9 series of vectors and DNA modules for assembly of CRISPR/Cas9 constructs. The constructs are made with zCas9i, a high efficiency intron-optimized SpCas9-coding gene - Sylvestre Marillonnet and Johannes Stuttmann.
- Plasmids for CRISPR base editing in:
- Rice and tomato - Akihiko Kondo
- Rice, wheat, and maize - Caixia Gao
- Arabidopsis - Qi-Jun Chen
Cloning
The following collections are useful for creating plant expression vectors:
- A modular plasmid assembly kit for multigene expression, gene silencing, and silencing rescue in plants - Martin Parniske.
- GreenGate Cloning System to create plant expression vectors containing several cassettes and generate multi-construct transgenic plants - Jan Lohmann.
- MoClo Plant Parts II and Infrastructure Kit for hierarchical assembly of plant multigene constructs - Johannes Stuttmann.
ORFeome Collections
The following collections are useful for studying gene expression in plants:
- Maize Transcription Factor ORFeome - John Gray
- Rice Transcription Factor ORFeome - John Gray
RNAi
The following collections are useful for gene silencing in plants:
- microRNAs in Arabidopsis - Detlef Weigel
- microRNAs in rice - Detlef Weigel
- microRNA and siRNA vectors in Arabidopsis - James Carrington
Empty Backbones
The table below highlights plasmids that can be used as empty backbones for your gene of interest for expression in plants. You can search the table for features you are looking for, such as the promoter or cloning method of choice.
| ID | Plasmid | Description | Promoter | Cloning Method | PI |
|---|
Fluorescent Proteins
The table below highlights plasmids that feature fluorescent or luminescent proteins for expression in plants. You can search the table for features you are looking for, such as the promoter or fluorescent protein of choice.
| ID | Plasmid | Description | Promoter | PI |
|---|
Other Resources
Addgene Blog Posts
- Tips for arabidopsis transformation
- Back to Bacteria: CRISPR gRNA Multiplexing Using tRNAs
- Engineering the Plant Genome Using CRISPR/Cas9
- Arabidopsis in Education: How the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center Brings Plant Science to Life
External Resources
- Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC) - The ABRC collects, preserves, reproduces, and distributes diverse seed and other stocks of Arabidopsis thaliana and related species.
- The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) - TAIR includes a database of genetic and molecular biology data for Arabidopsis thaliana research.
- BAR The Bio-Analytic Resource for Plant Biology - Tools for gene and protein expression and mapping of gene expression in plants.
- Figshare - Plant Illustrations - Collection of illustrations and pictures of plants, roots, shoots, and inflorescences - a growing resource for the plant science community.
- Grassius - a public web resource composed by a collection of databases, computational and experimental resources that relate to the control of gene expression in the grasses.
- OpenPlant Synthetic Biology Research Centre - The initiative promotes interdisciplinary exchange, open technologies, and responsible innovation for improvement of sustainable agriculture and conservation.
- Medicinal Plant Genomics Resource - Transcriptomic and metabolomic resources for 14 key medicinal plants for the advancement of drug production and development.
- The TapRoot - Podcast - The Taproot is a podcast to understand how scientific publications are created. Papers from the plant biology literature are discussed with one of the authors. The podcast is produced by Plantae.
- TraVa - Database of gene expression profiles in Arabidopsis thaliana based on RNA-seq analysis.
Do you have suggestions for other plasmids that should be added to this list?
Fill out our Suggest a Plasmid form or e-mail [email protected] to help us improve this resource!