Speaker: Bing Yang, Professor, University of Missouri, Donald Danforth Plant Science Center

Genome editing as an enabling tool has been revolutionizing the ways scientists advance basic understanding of biology and speed up application in medicine and agriculture. Creating and breeding broad-spectrum disease resistance to elite crops is critical to sustainable agriculture. Prime Editing, as one of CRISPR-based genome editing technologies, offers advantages over other relatives with precise and efficient installation of small deletion, insertion and all 12 base conversions in the genome of interest. For some plant diseases, pathogens use diverse virulence mechanisms to exploit host susceptibility genes, while plants evolve resistance by counteracting pathogen infection. We apply Prime Editing to recapitulate the genetic variations to achieve disease resistance and broad-spectrum resistance through multiplex editing in rice.