Abstract
Abstract The discovery of an adaptive immune system especially in archae and bacteria, CRISPR/Cas has revolutionized the field of agriculture and served as a potential gene editing tool, producing great excitement to the molecular scientists for the improved genetic manipulations. CRISPR/Cas9 is a RNA guided endonuclease which is popular among its predecessors ZFN and TALEN’s. The utilities of CRISPR from its predecessors is the use of short RNA fragments to locate target and breaking the double strands which avoids the need of protein engineering, thus allowing time efficiency measure for gene editing. It is a simple, flexible and highly efficient programmable DNA cleavage system that can be modified for widespread applications like knocking out the genes, controlling transcription, modifying epigenomes, controlling genome-wide screens, modifying genes for disease and stress tolerance and imaging chromosomes. However, gene cargo delivery system, off target cutting and issues on the safety of living organisms imposes major challenge to this system. Several attempts have been done to rectify these challenges; using sgRNA design software, cas9 nickases and other mutants. Thus, further addressing these challenges may open the avenue for CRISPR/cas9 for addressing the agriculture related problems.
Highlights
In the current scenario, world population is increasing in geometric proportion but the food materials available are increasing in arithmetic scale
Increase in world population from 7.3 billion to 9.7 billion by 2050 accompanied with increasing climate change has exacerbated the problem of food shortage
Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)/Cas9 has come at the right time when the conventional agriculture is striving to meet the growing food demands
Summary
The simple, efficient and highly specific CRISPR/Cas system is a promising tool for genome editing and is expected to have larger impacts on plant biology and on crop breeding. With the multiple traits being modified at a time, CRISPR/Cas system provides an efficient approach to pyramid breeding[40]. Gene editing by CRISPR/Cas has been adopted in nearly 20 crop species so far[41] for various traits including yield improvement, and biotic and abiotic stress management. CRISPR/Cas provides alternative approaches for delivering target genes into crops without any transgenic footprint, such as by viral infection, agro-infiltration, or preassembled Cas protein-sgRNA ribonucleoproteins transformation so as to bypass the traditional regulations on genetically modified organisms[43]
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