Engineering herbicide resistance via prime editing in rice

Abstract

Although CRISPR-Cas9 has revolutionized our ability to generate site-specific double-strand breaks, precise editing of the genome remains challenging in most eukaryotes, including plants (Shan et al., 2013). In plants homology-directed repair is inefficient, limiting our ability to make precise edits of the DNA sequence (Ali et al., 2020; Butt et al., 2017). Moreover, cytosine and adenine base editors have serious drawbacks including lower efficiency, unclean edited sequence, and the possibility of off-target mutations at other loci (Rees and Liu, 2018). Chimeric single guide RNAs (sgRNAs) can provide editing information, in RNA form, but this modality suffers from several limitations including lower efficiency, less versatility, and the need for long homology arms (Butt et al., 2017).