Abstract
Good quality of crops has always been the most concerning aspect for breeders and consumers. However, crop quality is a complex trait affected by both the genetic systems and environmental factors, thus, it is difficult to improve through traditional breeding strategies. Recently, the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing system, enabling efficiently targeted modification, has revolutionized the field of quality improvement in most crops. In this review, we briefly review the various genome editing ability of the CRISPR/Cas9 system, such as gene knockout, knock-in or replacement, base editing, prime editing, and gene expression regulation. In addition, we highlight the advances in crop quality improvement applying the CRISPR/Cas9 system in four main aspects: macronutrients, micronutrients, anti-nutritional factors and others. Finally, the potential challenges and future perspectives of genome editing in crop quality improvement is also discussed.
Highlights
Quality is the most important economic character of crops, determining products’ application value and market competitiveness
The authors think that three main reasons are hindering the pace of crop quality improvement:1) The genetic control network of quality traits is extremely complex, and the available gene resources are still not abundant; 2) Crop quality traits are susceptible to environmental factors, such as fertilizer, climate and biological stress; 3) Traditional breeding methods are time-consuming, random and introduce foreign genes
Transcriptomic analysis and protein SDS-PAGE showed that the transcription level of the D hordein gene and D hordein content in the mutant was lower than that of the wild type, which provided a basis for breeding high malt quality varieties
Summary
Quality is the most important economic character of crops, determining products’ application value and market competitiveness. A new generation of genome editing techniques, represented by regularly clustered interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated endonuclease 9 (CRISPR/Cas 9), is a revolutionary technology developed in the field of life sciences in recent years, which can produce predictable and heritable changes in specific locations of plant genomes. It includes deletion, insertion and replacement of base sequences to achieve precise improvement of plant traits. The applications of the CRISPR/Cas system in plant genome editing mainly focus on gene function research and genetic improvement of crops It has shown various genomeediting abilities, such as gene knockout, knock-in or replacement, base editing, prime editing, and expression regulation (Figure 1)
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