Multigene editing via CRISPR/Cas9 guided by a single-sgRNA seed in Arabidopsis.

We report that a solo single-guide RNA (sgRNA) seed is capable of guiding Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR -associated 9 (CRISRP/Cas9) to simultaneously edit multiple genes AtRPL10A, AtRPL10B and AtRPL10C in Arabidopsis. Our results also demonstrate that it is possible to use CRISPR/Cas9 technology to create AtRPL10 triple mutants which otherwise cannot be generated by conventional genetic crossing. Compared to other conventional multiplex CRISPR/Cas systems, a single sgRNA seed has the advantage of reducing off-target gene-editing. Such a gene editing system might be also applicable to modify other homologous genes, or even less-homologous sequences for multiple gene-editing in plants and other organisms.