2019 ASHS Annual Conference

Citrus is one of the most important fruit crops worldwide. New cultivars are needed to meet the need to overcome many biotic and abiotic threats as well as to improve the horticultural traits to create new marketing opportunities. However, the traditional approach of citrus breeding is difficult due to the long juvenility, large tree size, and prevalence of polyembryonic seeds in commercial varieties. Clustered regulatory interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) technology has been widely employed to edit genome in many organisms including citrus. Here I will overview the scientific and technological progress as well as challenges in citrus genome editing via CRISPR technology. The application of different CRISPR tools on citrus genome editing will be presented. Generating non-transgenic citrus varieties via CRISPR technology will also be discussed.