Breakthrough in Dicot Prime Editing: Enabling Heritable Desired Edits in Tomato and Arabidopsis

Prime editing (PE) enables almost all types of precise genome editing in animals and plants. It has been successfully adapted to edit several plants at variable efficiency and versatility. However, this technique is inefficient for dicots for unknown reasons. Here, by employing novel combinations of PE components, including an RNA chaperone and modified epegRNAs driven by a PolII-PolIII composite promoter and a viral replicon system, we obtained up to 9.7% of the desired PE efficiency at the callus stage assessed by targeted deep sequencing. Subsequently, we identified that up to 38.2% of transformants contained desired PE alleles in tomatoes and Arabidopsis, marking the first successful heritable PE transmission in dicots. Our PE tools also showed high accuracy, specificity, and multiplexing capability, which unlocked the potential for practical PE applications in dicots, paving the way for transformative advancements in plant sciences.