Chapter 16 - CRISPR-Cas9-mediated genome editing technology for abiotic stress tolerance in crop plant

Abstract

Various kinds of abiotic stresses such as drought, salinity, extreme heat and cold, and heavy metal contamination in soils significantly have impact on crop production. Due to global climate change, the severity of these stresses is increased. Therefore, development of new abiotic stress-tolerant crop variety is needed for feeding the ever-increasing global population. Although classical breeding techniques have been useful for the development of high yielding varieties for the green revolution in the last seven decades, these time-consuming techniques seem unable to meet the growing challenges of abiotic stresses to crop production. The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-associated enzyme (Cas) technology has recently been emerged as a revolutionary technique for precise editing of the targeted gene(s) in the genome of any organisms including plants. This technology is user-friendly, rapid, and cost-effective. Genomics and postgenomics analyses revealed a large body of knowledge on genes involved in abiotic stress tolerance in plants. Targeted editing (addition/deletion/rearrangement) of these genes associated with plants tolerance to particular abiotic stress is found useful for the improvement of plants for abiotic stress tolerance. However, to make a new green revolution using CRISPR-Cas technology, further improvement of this technology and necessary changes in the global regulatory system for greater acceptance of genome-edited crop plants are needed. This chapter reviews and updates the concept, mechanism, and application of CRISPR-Cas genome editing technology on the improvement of crop plants for abiotic stress tolerance. Furthermore, the future potentials and challenges of this technology in the improvement of crop plants for the tolerance of various abiotic stresses will also be discussed.