Report on the conference 'CRISPRing – A New Beginning for the Genetic Improvement of Plants and Microbes'

This international meeting (with some 130 participants from 20 countries) was organised in order to provide an overview of some of the latest developments in the field of plant and microbial genome editing by CRISPR-Cas technology and applications likely in the near future. Genome editing allows living organisms to be improved without the integration of foreign genes for important traits such as drought tolerance, resistance to pathogens or production of valuable metabolites.