Egg cell-specific promoter-controlled CRISPR/Cas9 efficiently generates homozygous mutants for multiple target genes in Arabidopsis in a single generation

Arabidopsis mutants produced by constitutive overexpression of the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing system are usually mosaics in the T1 generation. In this study, we used egg cell-specific promoters to drive the expression of Cas9 and obtained non-mosaic T1 mutants for multiple target genes with high efficiency. Comparisons of 12 combinations of eight promoters and two terminators found that the efficiency of the egg cell-specific promoter-controlled CRISPR/Cas9 system depended on the presence of a suitable terminator, and the composite promoter generated by fusing two egg cell-specific promoters resulted in much higher efficiency of mutation in the T1 generation compared with the single promoters. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13059-015-0715-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.