Plant and Fungal Genome Editing to Enhance Plant Disease Resistance Using the CRISPR/Cas9 System.

Narayan Chandra Paul,Joshua S Maccready,Martin I Chilvers,Haifeng Liu,Sungyu Choi,Hyunkyu Sang,Jihyeon Ma,Sung-Won Park

doi:10.3389/fpls.2021.700925

Narayan Chandra Paul, Joshua S Maccready + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2021.700925

Copy DOI

Abstract

Crop production has been substantially reduced by devastating fungal and oomycete pathogens, and these pathogens continue to threaten global food security. Although chemical and cultural controls have been used for crop protection, these involve continuous costs and time and fungicide resistance among plant pathogens has been increasingly reported. The most efficient way to protect crops from plant pathogens is cultivation of disease-resistant cultivars. However, traditional breeding approaches are laborious and time intensive. Recently, the CRISPR/Cas9 system has been utilized to enhance disease resistance among different crops such as rice, cacao, wheat, tomato, and grape. This system allows for precise genome editing of various organisms via RNA-guided DNA endonuclease activity. Beyond genome editing in crops, editing the genomes of fungal and oomycete pathogens can also provide new strategies for plant disease management. This review focuses on the recent studies of plant disease resistance against fungal and oomycete pathogens using the CRISPR/Cas9 system. For long-term plant disease management, the targeting of multiple plant disease resistance mechanisms with CRISPR/Cas9 and insights gained by probing fungal and oomycete genomes with this system will be powerful approaches.

Highlights

An increasing human population needs to have sufficient food supplies
The most destructive plant pathogens are the fungi and oomycetes, which are taxonomically distinct but have similar filamentous growth and host infection structures (Dong et al, 2015). These pathogens can destroy crops in a short period of time and cause severe famine such as the Irish potato famine caused by the oomycete pathogen Phytophthora infestans (Turner, 2005; Fones et al, 2020) and the Bengal famine caused by the rice brown spot fungal pathogen, Cochliobolus miyabeanus (Chakrabarti, 2001; Corredor-Moreno and Saunders, 2020)
In addition to applications in plants, genes encoding proteins that interact between host plants and fungal and oomycete pathogens have been targeted by clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9) to elucidate the underlying molecular mechanism of host-pathogen recognition and to generate screening systems for disease resistance (Fang and Tyler, 2016; Li et al, 2018)

Summary

Introduction

An increasing human population needs to have sufficient food supplies. With a projected global population in 2050 of 9.2 billion, this creates a significant increase in demand for food. In addition to applications in plants, genes encoding proteins that interact between host plants and fungal and oomycete pathogens have been targeted by CRISPR/Cas9 to elucidate the underlying molecular mechanism of host-pathogen recognition and to generate screening systems for disease resistance (Fang and Tyler, 2016; Li et al, 2018). We provide an overview of studies using CRISPR/Cas9-mediated genome editing of host plants and fungal/oomycete pathogens for improving disease resistance.

Results

Conclusion