Abstract
The world population is expected to increase from 7.3 to 9.7 billion by 2050. Pest outbreak and increased abiotic stresses due to climate change pose a high risk to tropical crop production. Although conventional breeding techniques have significantly increased crop production and yield, new approaches are required to further improve crop production in order to meet the global growing demand for food. The Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)/Cas9 (CRISPR-associated protein9) genome editing technology has shown great promise for quickly addressing emerging challenges in agriculture. It can be used to precisely modify genome sequence of any organism including plants to achieve the desired trait. Compared to other genome editing tools such as zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) and transcriptional activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), CRISPR/Cas9 is faster, cheaper, precise and highly efficient in editing genomes even at the multiplex level. Application of CRISPR/Cas9 technology in editing the plant genome is emerging rapidly. The CRISPR/Cas9 is becoming a user-friendly tool for development of non-transgenic genome edited crop plants to counteract harmful effects from climate change and ensure future food security of increasing population in tropical countries. This review updates current knowledge and potentials of CRISPR/Cas9 for improvement of crops cultivated in tropical climates to gain resiliency against emerging pests and abiotic stresses.
Highlights
Population growth, climate change, and food shortage are some of the threatening current issues for the world community
We focus on how Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein9 (Cas9) can be applied to improve crops that are better adapted to changing climate, emerging diseases, and improve product quality and address challenges pertaining to tropical crops
The somatic embryo lines successfully produced plantlets with the mutations (22–47% success rate; Odipio et al, 2017). These findings suggest that CRISPR/Cas9 could be applied for the targeted improvement of this important tropical food crop
Summary
Population growth, climate change, and food shortage are some of the threatening current issues for the world community. The ability to feed this rapidly growing population in the tropical region will soon become a critical issue that will need to be addressed by the society This situation will be exacerbated due to decrease in available arable land coupled with reduced crop yields that are both predicted to arise from the climate change. To keep up with the pace of population growth, it has recently been estimated that food production will need to be increased by 50% by 2030 and by 70–100% by 2050 for a well-fed world population (Godfray et al, 2010; Jones et al, 2014) To meet this predicted demand, crop varieties with higher yield, better adaptability to the changing climate as well as more tolerant to biotic and abiotic stresses will need to be developed in the decade on an urgent basis
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