ROLE OF CRISPR TO IMPROVE STRESS TOLERANCE IN PLANTS

Abstract

Climate changes and increasing human population is experiencing by most of the countries throughout the world, so, for production of crops with enhanced adaptation to the environment and high yield reliance through conventional breeding technologies seemed to be fully supporting now a days. It requires those techniques that increase crop yield in less time through developing resistance of plants for stress factors. Fortunately, for improvement of crops under the abiotic and biotic stress conditions, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) approach provided a way towards new horizon and consequently revolutionizing the plant breeding approach. This review article presents the optimization and mechanism of CRISPR strategy and its huge number of applications for crop improvement like domestication, fruit quality improvement, resistance to abiotic and biotic stresses is most highlighted aspect. In this review article there is a brief summary about CRISPR/Cas9 technique and its role in increasing agricultural yield by gene knock in or knock out. It also presents number of evidence based studies where this approach has been used for making plants resistant to biotic factors. Future perspectives and controversies have also been discussed.