Genome editing – a technology in time for plants

A tool for safe and site-specific mutagenesis has long been sought by plant biochemists. The recent emergence of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) genome-editing technology addresses this need. Using this technology, the lettuce genome was recently edited without the use of conventional Agrobacterium-mediated DNA delivery. As this method does not leave a trace of foreign DNA in the plant genome, it promises to advance the field of plant biotechnology for genetically modified organisms (GMOs) without the burden of costly de-regulation processes.