ABSTRACT
The genome editing field has changed rapidly since the development of the first site-directed nucleases (SDNs) and zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) in 1996. While base editors are relatively new in the field of plant genome editing, they represent a rapidly growing toolset for predictable genome editing outcomes. As such, significant effort has been applied to optimize base editors for this purpose resulting in a plethora of design variety which can be informative to base editing in plants. The recently developed adenine base editors have so far been applied in monocots as well as dicots. Several Cas9 variants have been tested in plants and demonstrated to function in base editing configurations. Herbicide-resistant gene base editing enables regeneration of edited but transgene-free plants on herbicide selection medium while simultaneously introducing additional traits through multiplexing. In plants, where increasing variation is central to the breeding process, background variation introduction is of little concern – especially in comparison to therapeutic uses in mammalian applications.
