CRISPR/Cas Genome Editing and Precision Plant Breeding in Agriculture

• Published in: Annual review of plant biology Vol. 70; p. 667
• Main Authors: Chen, Kunling, Wang, Yanpeng, Zhang, Rui, Zhang, Huawei, Gao, Caixia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 29.04.2019
• Subjects: Breeding; Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats; CRISPR-Cas Systems; Gene Editing; Genome, Plant; Plant Breeding; genome editing; trait improvement; CRISPR/Cas; precision plant breeding
• ISSN: 1545-2123
• DOI: 10.1146/annurev-arplant-050718-100049

Enhanced agricultural production through innovative breeding technology is urgently needed to increase access to nutritious foods worldwide. Recent advances in CRISPR/Cas genome editing enable efficient targeted modification in most crops, thus promising to accelerate crop improvement. Here, we review advances in CRISPR/Cas9 and its variants and examine their applications in plant genome editing and related manipulations. We highlight base-editing tools that enable targeted nucleotide substitutions and describe the various delivery systems, particularly DNA-free methods, that have linked genome editing with crop breeding. We summarize the applications of genome editing for trait improvement, development of techniques for fine-tuning gene regulation, strategies for breeding virus resistance, and the use of high-throughput mutant libraries. We outline future perspectives for genome editing in plant synthetic biology and domestication, advances in delivery systems, editing specificity, homology-directed repair, and gene drives. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities for precision plant breeding and its bright future in agriculture.