Engineering Herbicide-Resistant Rice Plants through CRISPR/Cas9-Mediated Homologous Recombination of Acetolactate Synthase

Genome editing technologies enable precise modifications of DNA sequences in vivo and offer great promise for crop improvement. CRISPR/Cas9 (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats/CRISPR-associated Cas9) has revolutionized genome editing because of its simplicity and versatility (Cong et al., 2013). However, the majority of the editing events reported in plants were through error-prone non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) to generate mutations and gene knockouts (Miao et al., 2013; Voytas and Gao, 2014; Xie et al., 2014; Ma et al., 2015).