Genome editing in cotton: challenges and opportunities

Table 1 Characteristics of various gene editing tools

Characteristic	ZFN	TALEN	CRISPR/Cas9	References
Binding principle	Protein-DNA	Protein-DNA	RNA-DNA	Cui et al. (2022)
Ease of design	Moderate	Easy	Very Easy	Buljung et al. (2022)
Assembling	Difficult	Easy	Very Easy	Buljung et al. (2022), Li et al. (2022a)
Time for construction	5–7 days	5–7 days	1–3 days	Buljung et al. (2022), Li et al. (2022a)
Cost	High	Moderate	Low	Khan et al. (2022)
Efficiency	Variable	High	High	Zeng et al. (2022)
Off-target effects	High but variable	Low	High	Kovalchuk (2021)
Single-unit or pair	Pair	Pair	Single unit	Tyagi et al. (2021)

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