Genome Editing Toward Rice Improvement

Abstract

AbstractRice (Oryza sativa L.) serves as the major food source feeding half of the world’s population. In the past century, the pedigree-based conventional, radiation-based mutational and DNA marker-based molecular breeding approaches have contributed enormously toward enhancement of rice productivity. However, it is becoming hard and hard to increase rice yield further due to several factors including a possible ceiling of rice yield potential, the frequent pest and pathogen attack, climate change, and other environmental issues such as decreasing water resources. Since the human population is still growing which was projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, it is urgent to develop new breeding technology for better cultivars that can produce more rice grains in an era of global warming. Recently, rapid advances of genome editing technologies such as the engineered site-specific nucleases (SSNs) tools provide immense potentials to revolutionize the fields of plant science and agriculture. Among the genome editing technologies, the CRISPR/Cas systems are the most widely accepted due to its simplicity, robustness and high efficiency. Rice has been increasingly used to test the efficiency of various types of genome editing tools to demonstrate their potentials in genetic improvement. Recently developed CRISPR/Cas-derived genome editing technologies including base editors and prime editors have evolved as additional efficient and accurate genome editing tools, which might accelerate the pace of crop improvement. In this chapter, we focus on the applications of genome editing tools for rice improvement and latest progresses achieved. The challenges and future implications of the genome editing-based rice improvement have also been discussed.KeywordsBase editorsCRISPR/Cas9Genome editingPrime editorsRice improvementTargeted mutagenesis