Chapter 9 - CRISPR-Cas technologies for food and nutritional security

Abstract

Food security is an alarming task for stakeholders and lawmakers to manage with the massive task of feeding the burgeoning global population that is forecasted to reach up to 10 billion in the next few years. Recently, the agricultural system has been facing a challenge to rapidly improve agricultural yield and accelerate tolerance to abiotic, biotic, and environmental stressors under extreme climatic change. Revolution in plant breeding strategies is innovative to fulfill nutritional demand and produce improvement in crop plants. Therefore, novel plant breeding techniques (NPBTs) facilitating a progressive advancement from manipulating genome editing approaches that provide novel, easy-to-design, low-cost, and less cumbersome work have paved the way to achieve high precision in modern plant breeding. Herein, we provide an elaborative overview of genome editing techniques (GETs) that are handy in generating novel and superior genotypes to mitigate nutritional security for crop improvements. Furthermore, we also provide a benchmark summary for the development of novel clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-associated protein system 9 (CRISPR-Cas9), and the catalog of its recent frontiers, namely base editing, prime editing, multiplex genome editing, and de nova domestication that can generate desired transgene-free edited cultivars show a long-standing impact and upgraded the editing efficiency, crop improvement, and nutritional value to engineering desired crop breeding programs. Successful examples of the CRISPR-Cas9 technique have been explicitly discussed to improve the abiotic and biotic stressors, important traits, and architecture of field crops with the greatest precision. In addition, the regulatory gene-family members were integrated to accelerate the applications of genome editing for agricultural yield. Lastly, we have also discussed various challenges and future perspectives of the CRISPR-Cas system that hinder achieving ideal genome editing systems.