New Gene-Editing System Enhances Precision in Key Crop Plants
Researchers in China have developed SmartPE, a novel gene-editing platform that significantly improves the efficiency of prime editing in dicot plants like tomatoes and soybeans. The system uses engineered reverse transcriptase templates and regulatory elements to overcome previous limitations in editing precision and success rates. This advancement could accelerate crop improvement for agriculture and food security.
On October 28, 2026, researchers led by Professor Gao Caixia at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences published a breakthrough in Nature Plants detailing SmartPE, a novel gene-editing system that dramatically improves prime editing efficiency in dicot plants such as tomatoes, soybeans, and rapeseed. Unlike conventional prime editing, which struggles with low success rates in these crops, SmartPE uses engineered reverse transcriptase templates (RTTs) with strategically placed mismatches, combined with a cis-regulatory element called START, to boost expression and editing outcomes. The system achieved up to 20% editing efficiency at certain targets—more than sixfold higher than standard methods—and enabled successful edits in nine out of nine tomato targets and nine out of eleven soybean targets exceeding 5%. In stable transformations, SmartPE produced homozygous edits in tomatoes (7.3%) and seamless insertions of FLAG tags and recombination sites at efficiencies up to 32%, far surpassing prior results. The team also demonstrated that mismatch placement matters: continuous or closely spaced mismatches (3 bp apart) yielded the best results, while wider spacing reduced efficiency. Notably, SmartPE’s mechanism appears distinct from traditional prime editing, as it does not benefit from MMR inhibition in cell lines—suggesting a different repair pathway is involved, though the exact molecular basis remains unclear.
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SmartPE could significantly accelerate the development of improved crop varieties, particularly for staple dicots like soybeans and tomatoes, potentially enhancing food security and reducing reliance on chemical inputs. Farmers, seed companies, and agribusinesses may benefit from faster breeding cycles and more predictable outcomes in genetic modification, possibly lowering costs and increasing adoption rates. The system’s ability to achieve high-efficiency edits without donor templates or double-strand breaks may also ease regulatory hurdles in some regions where gene-edited crops are treated more leniently than transgenic ones. Comparable to the earlier rollout of CRISPR-Cas9 in agriculture, SmartPE may catalyze a new wave of precision breeding, though its real-world impact will depend on how quickly it is adopted by public and private research institutions. Second-order effects could include shifts in seed market dynamics, with companies investing heavily in SmartPE-compatible platf