12Recent years, the bryophyte moss Physcomitrella patens has become an emerging 13 model organism for studying conserved signaling pathways and developmental 14 processes during plant evolution. Its short life cycle, ease of cultivation, and high rate of 15 homologous recombination have made it an ideal system for genetic analysis. However, 16 the presence of highly redundant genes and the difficulty of isolating hypomorphic 17 mutants have limited its broader use. Here we developed a simple, fast, and efficient 18 method to generate customized mutants in P. patens. We show that transient 19 cotransformation of CRISPR/Cas9 and oligonucleotide templates enables microindel 20 knock-in with high efficiency and accuracy. Using this method, we generated strains 21 carrying various types of mutations, including amino acid substitution, out-of-frame 22 deletion/insertion, splice site alteration, and small tag integration. We also demonstrate 23 that multiplex gene editing can be efficiently achieved to generate putative null and 24 hypomorphic mutants of redundant genes in one step. Thus our method will not only 25 simplify multiple-gene knockout, but also allows the generation of hypomorphic mutants 26 of genes of interest, especially those that are essential for viability. 27 28 Keywords 29 Bryophyte, Physcomitrella patens, CRISPR/Cas9, Oligonucleotide, Knock-in 30 4 2017a, 2017b). By forming a complex, its components, the endonuclease Cas9 and the 62 single guide RNA (sgRNA), are capable of introducing double-strand breaks (DSBs) at 63 predicted genomic loci once the sgRNA is customized with a targeting sequence (Jiang 64 and Doudna, 2017). These DSBs are repaired through the non-homologous end joining 65 or homology directed repair pathways, which leads to subsequent nucleotide changes 66 (Jiang and Doudna, 2017). In P. patens, CRISPR/Cas9 has been exploited to generate 67 heritable mutants (Nomura et al., 2016; Lopez-Obando et al., 2016; Collonnier et al., 68 2017a). However, it is unclear whether precise mutation knock-in can be achieved to 69 generate hypomorphic mutants. In addition, as microhomology-mediated end joining 70 (MMEJ) pathway is active in P. patens (Kamisugi et al., 2006; Collonnier et al., 2017a), 71 template-free editing can generate specific deletions at a high frequency, which may not 72 necessarily introduce out-of-frame mutations. For instance, a previous study reported 73 that 74% of the mutations generated by one CRISPR target are identical in-frame 74 deletions (Collonnier et al., 2017a).75 76Here we report a fast and efficient method to generate customized mutants in P. patens. 77 We show that transient cotransformation of CRISPR/Cas9 and oligonucleotide 78 templates induces microindel knock-in at a high efficiency and accuracy. This allows us 79 to introduce various types of mutations into the genome including amino acid 80 substitution, out-of-frame insertion/deletion, splice site alteration, or small tag integration. 81 We also demonstrate that multiplex gene editing can be effici...