This great work was led by @vivzhong.bsky.social and Katelyn Chu, two fantastic scientists! So proud of what they accomplished and excited to see where it goes from here.

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We exploited integration-free delivery to generate genome-edited plants with heritable CRISPR/Cas9 mutations and no integrated Cas9 T-DNA. This works with standard Agrobacterium protocols. Efficiency is modest (2.4% of switched seeds), but there's room to improve. (6/7)

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We found that ~1 in 5 delivery events never integrate. Many factors linked to transformation efficiency, including bacterial strain, vector borders, origin of replication and VirD2, primarily affect delivery rather than integration. (5/7)

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We built a genome-integrated recombinase-based switch that converts T-DNA delivery into a seed color change. This lets us measure delivery and integration as distinct steps in the plant transformation process. (4/7)

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Agrobacterium’s ability to transfer DNA into plants underlies much of modern plant biotech. Unfortunately, transferred T-DNA can integrate at unpredictable locations in the plant genome, limiting the precision of genetic modification. (2/7)

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