This summer I was able to work in the Wang lab which focuses their research on the model legume Medicago truncatula. Legumes are important because they use these organs on their roots called nodules to fix atmospheric nitrogen into usable forms through the use of symbiotic nitrogen fixation. By studying the genes that are involved in symbiotic nitrogen fixation we can gain a better understanding of the pathways involved and the proteins that are necessary for functional nodule formation. This can be applied to agriculture as we can investigate alternative environmentally friendly ways of providing nitrogen to crops. We used CRISPR-Cas9 as a gene editing tool to knockout genes and study its effects. This was done by a two guide RNA construct that was designed to delete across a span of two nodule specific genes called nodulin 22 and nodulin 25.
