Efficient Virus-Mediated Genome Editing in Plants Using the CRISPR/Cas9 System

Targeted genome editing in plants will not only facilitate functional genomics studies but also help to discover, expand, and create novel traits of agricultural importance (Pennisi, 2010). The most widely used approach for editing plant genomes involves generating targeted double-strand DNA breaks (DSBs) and harnessing the two main DSB repair pathways: imprecise non-homologous end joining and precise homology-directed repair (Voytas, 2013). Enzymes that specifically bind the user-selected genomic sequences to create DSBs can be generated de novo as synthetic bimodular proteins containing a DNA-binding module, engineered to bind a user-defined sequence, along with a DNA-cleaving module, capable of making DSBs.