CRISPR/Cas Genome Editing in Fruit Crops: Recent Advances, Challenges, and Future Prospects

Fruit crop offers a wide variety of beneficial metabolites and nutrients that favor human health. Increasing concerns over food and nutritional instability caused by significant climatic changes have posed challenges to crop development, quality, and yield in fruit crops. Conventional farming methods are time-consuming and labor-intensive and are not able to provide long-term solutions to meet the current challenges in fruit cultivation. In this era, newly developed technology like clustered regulatory interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR/Cas)-based genome editing could be a promising approach for trait improvement in fruit crops. This technology can offer efficient means to modify targeted genes that lead to desirable features such as improving fruit quality traits, increasing fruit yield, changing plant architecture that favors fruit development, enhancing nutritional levels, improving shelf life, knocking out genes producing anti-nutrient compounds, improving tolerance to abiotic stress, and reducing fruit disease susceptibility. Furthermore, its simple operation and high mutation efficiency have encouraged researchers working in fruit crops to introduce this technology to generate new germplasm via gene-directed mutation. It is possible to swiftly create newly improved varieties for the development of crucial agronomic traits by precisely editing key genes/transcription factors in fruit crops using CRISPR/Cas. In this chapter, we summarized the mechanism and applications of CRISPR/Cas as a possible technology in improving agronomical traits that benefit fruit crop breeding.