Abstract
Horticultural crops are an important part of agriculture for food as well as nutritional security. However, several pests and diseases along with adverse abiotic environmental factors pose a severe threat to these crops by affecting their quality and productivity. This warrants the effective and accelerated breeding programs by utilizing innovative biotechnological tools that can tackle aforementioned issues. The recent technique of genome editing by Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats/CRISPR associated 9 (CRISPR/Cas9) has greatly advanced the breeding for crop improvement due to its simplicity and high efficiency over other nucleases such as Zinc Finger Nucleases and Transcription Activator Like Effector Nucleases. CRISPR/Cas9 tool contains a non-specific Cas9 nuclease and a single guide RNA that directs Cas9 to the specific genomic location creating double-strand breaks and subsequent repair process creates insertion or deletion mutations. This is currently the widely adopted tool for reverse genetics, and crop improvement in large number of agricultural crops. The use of CRISPR/Cas9 in horticultural crops is limited to few crops due to lack of availability of regeneration protocols and sufficient sequence information in many horticultural crops. In this review, the present status of applicability of CRISPR/Cas9 in horticultural crops was discussed along with the challenges and future potential for possible improvement of these crops for their yield, quality, and resistance to biotic and abiotic stress.
Highlights
Horticulture is an important and integral part of the economy that contributes significantly to the total agricultural production
The tomato plant having both Self pruning 5G (sp5G) and sp genes mutated were very compact with early flowering. This experiment undoubtedly establishes the successful use of CRISPR/Cas9 in vegetable crop improvement
Broad spectrum resistance against viruses from potyviridae family was built in cucumber through knockout of eIF4E gene with the help of CRISPR/Cas9 using two gRNAs targeted at two different sites of eIF4E gene (Chandrasekaran et al, 2016)
Summary
Horticulture is an important and integral part of the economy that contributes significantly to the total agricultural production. The tomato plant having both sp5G and sp genes mutated were very compact with early flowering This experiment undoubtedly establishes the successful use of CRISPR/Cas in vegetable crop improvement. The other group has exploited a different approach by mutating SlIAA9 gene involved in auxin signaling pathway that represses initiation of fruit development without fertilization (Ueta et al, 2017) This precise and rapid method of developing parthenocarpy can be utilized in other horticultural crops like watermelon, pointed gourd, bitter gourd, etc. Broad spectrum resistance against viruses from potyviridae family was built in cucumber through knockout of eIF4E gene with the help of CRISPR/Cas using two gRNAs targeted at two different sites of eIF4E gene (Chandrasekaran et al, 2016).
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