Abstract
Food crop production and quality are two major attributes that ensure food security. Rice is one of the major sources of food that feeds half of the world’s population. Therefore, to feed about 10 billion people by 2050, there is a need to develop high-yielding grain quality of rice varieties, with greater pace. Although conventional and mutation breeding techniques have played a significant role in the development of desired varieties in the past, due to certain limitations, these techniques cannot fulfill the high demands for food in the present era. However, rice production and grain quality can be improved by employing new breeding techniques, such as genome editing tools (GETs), with high efficiency. These tools, including clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) systems, have revolutionized rice breeding. The protocol of CRISPR/Cas9 systems technology, and its variants, are the most reliable and efficient, and have been established in rice crops. New GETs, such as CRISPR/Cas12, and base editors, have also been applied to rice to improve it. Recombinases and prime editing tools have the potential to make edits more precisely and efficiently. Briefly, in this review, we discuss advancements made in CRISPR systems, base and prime editors, and their applications, to improve rice grain yield, abiotic stress tolerance, grain quality, disease and herbicide resistance, in addition to the regulatory aspects and risks associated with genetically modified rice plants. We also focus on the limitations and future prospects of GETs to improve rice grain quality.
Highlights
Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is grown across the globe and consumed by approximately 3 billion people or around 50% of the world population [1,2]
Keeping in view with the rapid development in the field of genome editing in general and CRISPR technologies in particular, we discuss the advancements made in CRISPR/Cas9, modified Cas proteins, base and prime editing systems, with the passage of time, and their applications, to improve rice grain yield, tolerance to abiotic stresses, disease resistance, herbicide resistance, and end-use quality
We focus on the limitations and future prospects of genome editing tools (GETs) to improve rice for the above-mentioned traits
Summary
Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is grown across the globe and consumed by approximately 3 billion people or around 50% of the world population [1,2]. Rice grain quality, climate resilience, disease Agronomy 2021, 11, x FOR PEER RErVeIsEiWstance, and yield have improved via conventional breeding approaches (mut3agoef n24esis and hybridization) These techniques are time-consuming, tedious, require large mutant screens, and are prone to human biases [4]. Keeping in view with the rapid development in the field of genome editing in general and CRISPR technologies in particular, we discuss the advancements made in CRISPR/Cas, modified Cas proteins, base and prime editing systems, with the passage of time, and their applications, to improve rice grain yield, tolerance to abiotic stresses, disease resistance, herbicide resistance, and end-use quality. Targeting of rice fruit weight 4, OsFWL4 [32] with sgRNA/Cas led to increases in flag leaf area, grain length, number of tillers, and grain yield
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