Potential of advanced genome editing tools in plant biotechnology and crop improvement: progress and challenges

Climate change has made plants more vulnerable to various stresses, which presents a significant threat to the world’s food supply. Despite several efforts deployed over the last three decades in plant breeding and genetic engineering, there is still a lot to be done for crop improvement. CRISPR/Cas is a naturally occurring genome editing tool adopted from the bacterial adaptive immune defense system. Gene editing has undergone a revolutionary change since the discovery of CRISPR/Cas-based genome engineering. This emerging technology recently implemented, has enabled targeted mutagenesis with unprecedented simplicity and accuracy, making it suitable to edit DNA sequences at site-specific targets with ultimate precision. Currently, this cutting-edge technology has been extensively used and incessantly improved at several orders of magnitude to contribute as a robust approach for studying gene function with a variety of applications that can accelerate basic and applied research toward crop improvement. This mini-review briefly describes some of the major achievements in genome editing tools and highlights future outlooks for these technologies in functional genomics and applied plant biotechnology.