Pyramiding favorable alleles in an elite wheat variety in one generation by CRISPR-Cas9-mediated multiplex gene editing

摘要

Dear Editor, Common wheat(Triticum aestivum,2n=6x=42,AABBDD)is a major staple crop consumed by more than 30％of the world's population.It is the main source of cereal-based processed prod-ucts,such as bread,cookies,pasta,and noodles.Although wheat production increased by 10-fold following the Green revo-lution and maker-assisted breeding over the past decades,it is still facing unprecedented challenges in the context of global climate changes,growing world population,decreased farm-lands,as well as water shortages in arid and semi-arid lands.Meanwhile,the functional redundancy of genes in hexaploidy wheat makes a forward genetics approach to select a desired phenotype,especially for pyramiding of several agronomically important traits in a modern variety,very time-consuming and,in some cases,impossible because of gene linkage or gene drag(Hickey et al.,2019).