Recently, gene edited mutants with high resistance to V.dahliae were created, and provided the new germplasms for breeding defense cultivars. These results were finished via the cooperation from Li Fuguang’s team of Insititute of Cotton Research of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) and Wu Jiahe’s team of institute of microbiology of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and were published in the Frontiers in Plan Science in June 28th. 

Cotton verticillium wilt, called as “cotton cancer”, is a destructive disease, annually leading to huge economic losses in China. The breed of disease-resistant cultivars via cross breeding hits a bottleneck, where few resistant genes or germplasm resources against V. dahliae are naturally found in G. hirsutum. A CRISPR/Cas9-mediated genome editing system provided the strategy for improving disease-resistance. The ce1 and ce2 lines with high resistance to V. dahlia were generated via genome editing technology in our research, which were directly used as germplasms to breed defense cultivars. Besides, our study firstly clarify the method for identify the gene editing sites in A and D subgenomes.