Role of CRISPR-Cas and Its Application in Mitigating Plant Stress

Studies on stress physiology in plants are gradually becoming a priority for every researcher due to its direct effect on crop productivity, disturbing their process of growth and development which instantly poses a threat to global food security. There are two types of plant stresses: biotic and abiotic. Although conventional breeding, molecular breeding, and genetically engineered crops have been practiced for years, they are tedious, time consuming, and lack wide acceptance due to ethical issues. Plant biotechnologists are now much interested in applying gene editing techniques to improve the genetic traits in agronomically important crops. The clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat-Cas (CRISPR/Cas) system is one of the gene editing techniques that is widely accepted due to its robust nature, simplicity, adaptability, flexibility, and wide applicability. CRISPR-Cas is a highly advanced technique of multiple sequence-specific nucleases where site-specific gene modification is precisely facilitated, which leads to the development of adaptable, high-yielding, and novel climate-resilient crops. In this chapter, we try to understand the types of biotic and abiotic stresses experienced by plants, the molecular mechanism of stress responses in plants, and widely the application of high-end techniques of the CRISPR/Cas genome-editing system for improving stress tolerance in plants for mitigating such conditions and meeting the food crisis of the present growing population.