Major concerns:
Figure 1 is well constructed and presented, but it was slightly unclear in the beginning about why the repair template was 10 bp long with CTGCCGTTTA as its sequence. We feel, including the Supplemental Figure 1.1 A into Figure 1 of the main paper would be very helpful in understanding the steps taken to generate gl1 CRISPR lines and the reason for choosing this repair template. Nonetheless, we believe it was a clever idea. Figure 3B show the random somatic events occurred in the T2 generation. However, it was not clear what this figure wanted to tell us.
In the chromatogram shown in Figure 4B, authors have claimed that peaks occurring at the site of Cas9 cleavage indicate a biallelic or chimeric mutation. However, we believe this chromatogram simply shows a heterozygous plant. In order it to be considered chimeric or biallelic the chromatogram should have shown three peaks, not double peaks.
Furthermore, using the loss of trichomes as a visual marker first sounded a good idea, however, after taking the number of plants needed for screening into account we think the authors could have chosen a different visual marker that is easier to distinguish.
Lastly, we would like to know whether the authors have tried and tested a pIPTG-Nick construct? Since they have managed to achieve repair only in pIPGT-Nuc construct, we think it is very crucial to test the same construct with nickase enzyme.