Engineered DNA sites boost targeted gene integration in rice and human cells
A team optimized site-specific recombination by engineering chimeric attachment sites for the Bxb1 recombinase, published in Nature Biotechnology on 4 September 2026. The best-performing variant, attB(V111), achieved 51.9% integration efficiency in HEK293T cells and 35.6% in rice protoplasts, improvements of 1.7-fold and 4.4-fold over wild-type sites. When paired with an engineered single protein mutant in the Bxb1 catalytic domain, the optimized system reached 31% efficiency for a CD19 chimeric antigen receptor cassette and 25% for an ornithine transcarbamylase expression cassette in human cells. In rice, a 5.8 kb herbicide-resistance cassette was stably integrated in 24% of regenerated plants.
The approach gives plant breeders and cell engineers a safer route to precise genome edits without nucleases.
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