Generation of homozygous canker-resistant citrus in the T0 generation using CRISPR-SpCas9p

Citrus is the most produced fruit in the world and provides important nutrients such as vitamin C. However, citrus production worldwide faces many biotic and abiotic challenges. Citrus genetic improvement through traditional breeding is a lengthy, difficult, and laborious process due to the long juvenility, nucellar embryony, sexual incompatibility, highly heterozygous nature, and male or female sterility. The Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-mediated genome editing has been suggested to be a putative solution for rapid improvement of existing citrus varieties (Dutt et al., 2015).