Abstract
The ability to create targeted modifications in the genomes of plants using genome editing technologies has revolutionized research in crop improvement in the current dispensation of molecular biology. This technology has attracted global attention and has been employed in functional analysis studies in crop plants. Since many important agronomic traits are confirmed to be determined by single-nucleotide polymorphisms, improved crop varieties could be developed by the programmed and precise conversion of targeted single bases in the genomes of plants. One novel genome editing approach which serves for this purpose is base editing. Base editing directly makes targeted and irreversible base conversion without creating double-strand breaks (DSBs). This technology has recently gained quick acceptance and adaptation because of its precision, simplicity, and multiplex capabilities. This review focuses on generating different base-editing technologies and how efficient they are in editing nucleic acids. Emphasis is placed on the exploration and applications of these base-editing technologies to enhance crop production. The review also highlights the drawbacks and the prospects of this new technology.
Highlights
Over the years, few genome editing technologies emerged to help to modify the genomes of plants and animals for various reasons
While homology-directed repair (HDR) shows a high-fidelity in its repair mechanism resulting in the insertion or replacement of gene, the non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) is prone to errors and randomly makes indels (Voytas and Gao, 2014)
Automatic plant genetic engineering with high-throughput is possible using this technology. It seems to have a simplistic conceptual frame, a proper understanding of its basic concept, implementation, and possible drawbacks is essential. This current study offers a synthesis of available information concerning the aforementioned gaps in this technology and offers further possibilities in crop improvement using the base editing of plant genomes
Summary
Few genome editing technologies emerged to help to modify the genomes of plants and animals for various reasons. CRISPR/Cas has gained worldwide attention as an efficient genome editing technology in plants and animals. The simplicity, versatility, and cost-effectiveness of this technology have led to a great agricultural revolution. This system uses the Cas9-sgRNA complex to create breaks in the double-strands of DNA in the organism. These double-strand breaks (DSBs) are corrected either through a non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) approach or homology-directed repair (HDR) mechanism (Danner et al, 2017). Using the HDR approach in plants is still a daunting task due to its inherently low frequency and the few numbers of donor repair templates (DRTs) delivery to the cells of plants (Sun et al, 2016; Lee et al, 2018)
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