Precise customization of plant architecture by combinatorial genetic modification of peptide ligands

Recent studies have emphasized the importance of editing cis-regulatory elements rather than protein-coding regions to subtly adjust plant traits (Rodríguez-Leal et al., 2017). However, targeting cis-regulatory elements for mild phenotypic changes has been challenging, often failing to yield significant phenotypic change (Kwon et al., 2020). This underscores the necessity for innovative approaches to secure subtle phenotypic variations. Given the prevalence of gene duplication and redundancy in plant evolution, whereby multiple genes across different families may control a single function (Rodriguez-Leal et al., 2019), our approach involves editing several redundant genes within a family to precisely customize plant traits.