Genome editing in plants by engineered CRISPR–Cas9 recognizing NG PAM

Streptococcus pyogenes Cas9 (SpCas9) is widely used for genome editing and requires NGG as a protospacer adjacent motif (PAM). Here, we show that the engineered SpCas9 (SpCas9-NGv1) can efficiently mutagenize endogenous target sites with NG PAMs in the rice and Arabidopsis genomes. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the SpCas9-NGv1 nickase fused to cytidine deaminase mediates C-to-T substitutions near the 5′ end of the target sequence.