Abstract

The technological breakthrough has been a major driving force for promoting agriculture development and production. Increasing world population and climate change are big threats to food security and agriculture sustainability. In recent years, genome editing (GE) has emerged as the most promising technology, which offers potential solutions for crop improvement and achieving agriculture sustainability. Compared to sophisticated and time-consuming conventional plant breeding approaches, advent of GE tools and their potential use in crop improvement, provided new insight into plant breeding for trait improvement. Genetic variations are the primary means of crop improvement in agriculture system, which can be achieved through many ways including mutations breeding, crossbreeding, transgenic technology, and GE. In the present scenario, where transgenic technology involves the transfer of exogenous gene of desired trait to elite crop variety, but very limited crops are available for commercial use due to comprehensive stringent government regulations on genetically modified organisms and its public acceptance. In contrast, GE offers precise site specific modification (targeted mutagenesis) in the genome to get relevant change in elite crop leading to the production of improved varieties in short duration. The present article focuses on some of the key GE tools developed for targeted mutagenesis in desired gene, i.e., meganucleases, zinc finger nucleases, transcription activator like effectors nuclease and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat/Cas9 technology, along with their applications in crop improvement for developing abiotic stress resilience mainly for drought and salinity in different crops such as wheat, rice, maize, and chickpea. Therefore, the development of GE tools holds a promise to play a pivotal role in contemporary crop breeding system and meeting agriculture sustainability through crop improvement.

Key words: Genome editing, Molecular breeding, Crop improvement, Climate change