Abstract
Protecting food crops from viral pathogens is a significant challenge for agriculture. An integral approach to genome-editing, known as CRISPR/Cas9 (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and CRISPR associated protein 9), is used to produce virus-resistant cultivars. The CRISPR/Cas9 tool is an essential part of modern plant breeding due to its attractive features. Advances in plant breeding programs due to the incorporation of Cas9 have enabled the development of cultivars with heritable resistance to plant viruses. The resistance to viral DNA and RNA is generally provided using the Cas9 endonuclease and sgRNAs (single-guide RNAs) complex, targeting particular virus and host plant genomes by interrupting the viral cleavage or altering the plant host genome, thus reducing the replication ability of the virus. In this review, the CRISPR/Cas9 system and its application to staple food crops resistance against several destructive plant viruses are briefly described. We outline the key findings of recent Cas9 applications, including enhanced virus resistance, genetic mechanisms, research strategies, and challenges in economically important and globally cultivated food crop species. The research outcome of this emerging molecular technology can extend the development of agriculture and food security. We also describe the information gaps and address the unanswered concerns relating to plant viral resistance mediated by CRISPR/Cas9.
Highlights
Food crops are vulnerable to various diseases including bacteria, fungi and viruses, resulting in major economic losses
We address the key features of the CRISPR/Cas9 genome-editing technique and its implications for new food crop cultivar evolutions with improved plant virus resistance
The results proved the ability of CRISPR/Cas9 technology to target the infectious strains of Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV) in the CP, IR and Rep sequences in transgenic
Summary
Food crops are vulnerable to various diseases including bacteria, fungi and viruses, resulting in major economic losses. New breeding techniques (NBTs) comprise the latest and most effective biological methods for the accurate genetic manipulation of single or several target genes They use a site-driven nuclease to add double-stranded breaks in DNA at specified regions. CRISPR/Cas is considered a highly promising genome-editing method in crops due to its unique features, such as reliable precision, multiple-gene editing, limited off-target impact, greater output, and simplicity [9] This particular mechanism invades foreign DNA fragments of virus particles and enables them to detect and degrade the DNA or RNA sequences for further invasion [10]. The CRISPR/Cas method was initially designed to cause cleavage in DNA in vitro at different sites [19,20] This method has recently been implemented to edit genomes in bacteria, fungi, viruses, yeast and many other organisms for successful selective mutagenesis [20,21,22,23]
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