Genome Editing for Plant Disease Resistance

Abstract

Plant diseases severely affect crop yield and quality, and this poses a huge threat to global food security. Plant pathogens are a hazard for agriculture. Mostly phytopathogens are known to misuse the dominantly inherited genes, called susceptibility (S) genes, to facilitate their proliferation. Genetic disruption of these genes has been one of the successful ways to combat the pathogens and induce a durable disease resistance. Novel genome-editing technologies offer opportunities to control viral, bacterial, fungal pathogens, etc., and implement a pathogen resistance in plants. Site-directed mutagenesis, zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and clustered regularly interspaced short palindrome repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9) are some of the most important genetic tools witnessed in the recent years. CRISPR/Cas9 has been reported as an effective tool since it is versatile, less expensive, easier to design and implement, and has a higher success rate. In this chapter, we focus on the use of the genome-editing techniques for the development of transgene-free and durable disease-resistant crop varieties.