This quarter, using Cas9m4, with conjugated activation or repression domains, we intended to modify the expression of citrus proteins responsible for regulating flowering, namely TERMINAL FLOWER-1 (TFL), in order to reduce juvenility. TFL is a repressor of flowering and has been shown to inhibit flowering when overexpressed and to increase flowering when enhanced in Arabidopsis thaliana. We want to down-regulate TFL transiently, so we intend to decrease maturation times and do so without the use of transgenic insertion that is deemed unfavorable. For this quarter, we have gotten our early real-time PCR results. Using an activator construct pCAMBIA-2201-Cas9m4-VP16-EcR along with a sgRNA construct, pCAMBIA-1302-TFL-sgRNA-968 for one experiment, we have generated data from two different experiments. Statistical analysis awaits, but the early data suggest that instead of up-regulating TFL as predicted, we have slightly down-regulated the gene, suggesting that targeting the 5� UTR of the TFL gene does not allow the transient CRISPR machinery to work. Our follow up experiment is using a repressor, pCAMBIA-2201-Cas9m4-KRAB, to verify the extent to which we can down-regulate the gene and hopefully cause early flowering.