Genome Editing Technologies in Crops Improvement

There is an urgent need to improve crops to meet the growing global food demand and improve nutrition. Traditional breeding methods have certain limitations as they are time and resource-intensive and pose biosecurity issues. These limitations can be overcome with newly developed genome editing techniques that can precisely modify DNADNA sequences at the genomicGenomics level using sequence-specific nucleases (SSNs). Among the SSNs designed, CRISPRClustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)/Cas9 is the most recently developed targeted genome editingGenome editing system and appears to be the most efficient, cheapest, easy, user-friendly and fastest approved genome editing tool. Large-scale genome editing has not only improved yield and quality but also improved disease resistance in many other important models and crops. A growing number of case studies indicate that genome editingGenome editing is an efficient, precise and powerful technology that can accelerate basic and applied research to improve crops. In this review, we briefly review the genome editing techniques and their relationship with crop improvement, challenges for genome editing and the mechanism of genome editingGenome editing tools and then conclude by examining advances in the application of genome editing tools to crop improvement, including the latest case studies using CRISPRClustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)/Cpf1 and basic editing techniques for improving biotic and abiotic stressAbiotic stress tolerance, enhancing growth, yield and nutritional qualitiesNutritional qualities. We also discuss prospects for improving the agronomic and qualities of crops.