Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-Associated Proteins (Cas) [CRISPR–Cas]: An Emerging Technique in Plant Disease Detection and Management

A great challenge has come to scientists to provide food to every person of the growing population that will reach nearly ten billion globally within 2050. Another challenge for us is to protect our crops in agrifield and also storage from various pathogens and pests as they cause huge crop damage. Once upon a time, we seemed that chemical pesticides or fungicides might be able to protect our crop from pathogens and pests but later the environmental pollution due to their use and pathogens’ resistance to pesticides, compelled us to think for better strategies. So, transgenic crops or GMOs were introduced in agrisystem, but at the same time a huge debate was raised for their acceptability. In this perspective, the most recent or emerging molecular technology has come that is the CRISPR (Cas) technique. It is basically the most advanced genome editing technique used to edit any gene in any organism. History showed that CRISPR (Cas) system was first detected in prokaryotic organisms as an adaptive immunity which is very efficient to detect and kill any foreign nucleic acid. Later on, this technique has been applied and is being applied in both plant and animal systems including humans to detect and manage pathogens and pests. It can easily identify virulence genes in pathogens as well as susceptibility and resistant genes in plants, so it edits virulence genes in pathogens to make it nonpathogenic and similarly edits susceptibility genes of plants that makes plants resistant to pathogens or pests. CRISPR (Cas) has minimized limitations of earlier technologies. Therefore, in this work, history, the fundamental idea of CRISPR (Cas), types, mechanism and its present and future applications in plant disease (pathogen) detection and management or crop protection from different biotic factors like virus, bacteria and fungi have been critically analysed.