SmartPE enables efficient prime editing in dicot crops.

SmartPE substantially increases prime editing efficiency in dicot crop protoplasts, achieving 6.3–23.0-fold in Arabidopsis thaliana (Col-0) and 8.2–38.2-fold in Solanum lycopersicum.

• Why it matters: Prime editing in dicot plants is limited by low efficiency and locus-dependent variability, restricting broad use across crop species and target sites.
• What they did: SmartPE combines a dual-pegRNA strategy with designed mismatched bases in RTTs, plus cis-regulatory elements and engineered reverse transcriptases, tested in crop protoplasts and in tomato hairy roots and stable transformants.
• The result: In tomato hairy roots, SmartPE produced homozygous (7.3%) and heterozygous (12.5%) edits at SlOR2 versus only heterozygous (1.0%) edits with standard PE, and stable transformation reached up to 32.3% editing efficiency.