Creating amylose-free barley cultivars with high soluble sugar content by genome editing

Here we created new alleles of the Waxy gene using CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing. Mutagenesis of single bases in these novel alleles caused absence of intact waxy protein in grain of the edited line. Transcriptome analysis identified differences between the edited line and the WT that could partly explain the reduction in amylose and amylopectin contents and the increase in soluble sugar, sucrose and β-glucan contents.