Tending genome editing via CRISPR/Cas9-induced mutagenesis: Opportunity and challenges for yield, quality and nutritional improvement of fruit crops

Abstract

Fruit crops, including bananas, apples, citrus fruit, grape, berries, etc. not only offer essential nutrients for sustaining healthy human life but also contribute to a major part of the GDP of many countries. Given the unprecedented climatic alterations and anticipated hidden conflicts, food and nutritional insecurity concerns of the world are mounting alarmingly high over the last few decades. These daunting conditions show how a huge section of the global population is currently “chronically undernourished”. However, since the green revolution, access to food has substantially increased; but unfortunately, these foods are considered deprived of overall nutritional contents. Thus to guarantee global food and nutritional insecurity concerns, it is enormously crucial that the agricultural productivity of Nutri-enriched food crops must be widely amplified within a few years or decades. For this, conventional breeding assisted with intensive agricultural practices, extensive use of agrochemicals, more farm mechanization, and additional agricultural land is required. Therefore, these approaches are not much viable, effective, and unable to offer long-term solutions. Henceforth, we have to search for alternate sources of foods with high nutritional values, and breeding strategies to supplement our growing food and nutritional requirements. Therefore, the fruits can be an efficient candidate and viable to tackle aforesaid issues. However, the quality traits, nutritional values, and productivity of most fruit crops are deteriorated because of several hidden factors. Overall quality traits, nutritional values, and yield potentials of the fruit crops can be augmented by integrating conventional breeding with newly evolved high-throughput modern biotechnology platforms like gene or, genome editing technologies. Until that, many scientific efforts have been made in all cereal crops but very scarce or no efforts have been reported in imperative fruit crops using genome editing technologies. Henceforth, with this holistic vision, the present manuscript elaborates on the mechanisms, recent advances, challenges, and potentials of CRISPR/Cas9 mediated genome editing as a possible candidate "game-changer" technology for targeted improvement of fruit crops. In total without a doubt, the rapidly advancing CRISPR/Cas9-mediated genome editing with great breeding efficiency will certainly boost the overall improvement of fruit crops.