Genetic Improvement of Chickpea Using CRISPR-Based Genome Editing Strategy

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.), an important leguminous crop, ranks second among pulses. Being nutritious, chickpea is vital to overcome food and nutritional insecurity of human beings and livestock. It possesses a narrow genetic base and consequently limited genetic variability is available in the existing gene pool for crop improvement. Conventional plant breeding methods like selection, mutagenesis and introgression have been used to improve chickpea and develop cultivars with improved yield potential and stress resistance. The goal of abiotic as well as biotic stress tolerance still eludes for most of the stresses primarily due to scarcity of adequate sources of resistance/tolerance. This aspect has driven the attention of scientists to exploit biotechnological tools to engineer chickpea to enhance resistance/tolerance, improve quality and increase yield. Recent advances in biotechnology have facilitated editing of the complex genomes with high precision and accuracy. “Zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcriptional activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein (Cas)” are sequence-specific nucleases deployed in genome editing. CRISPR/Cas has turned out to be the most favored genome editing tool owing to its reliability, cost-effectiveness, robustness and for generation of transgene-free plants. This chapter summarizes the applications, limitations and prospects of CRISPR/Cas-based approaches and transformation regimes for improvement of chickpea with the aim of food and health security.