Genome-Editing Advances for Disease Resistance in Plants

Global food security relies on agricultural crops, and their yield is affected by various phytopathogens. These phytopathogens are prevented by using chemical pesticides that poses huge threat to the environment, surrounding microflora, and health hazards. To overcome this conventional breeding techniques are used from decades to make resistant crops against various phytopathogens and have proven its potential. Regardless of these techniques, rapid generation of disease resistant plant varieties holds immense potential. The various genetic engineering tools like zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENS), and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)/CRISPR-associated proteins (CRISPR-Cas) based systems led to the precise genetic insertions and deletions (indels) which can be deployed. CRISPR-Cas tool is the most recent and one of the precise gene editing systems which has opened up new possibilities of gene editing for crop improvement with desired traits. In this chapter, various gene editing approaches and their advancements along with the applications have been discussed.