Abstract. Improving crops through plant breeding, an important approach for sustainable agriculture, has been utilized to increase the yield and quality of foods and other biomaterials for human use. Crops, including cereals, vegetables, ornamental flowers, fruits, and trees, have long been cultivated to produce high-quality products for human consumption. Conventional breeding technologies, such as natural cross-hybridization, mutation induction through physical or chemical mutagenesis, and modern transgenic tools are often used to enhance crop production. However, these breeding methods are sometimes laborious and complicated, especially when attempting to improve desired traits without inducing pleiotropic effects. Recently, targeted genome editing (TGE) technology using engineered nucleases, including meganucleases, zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) nucleases, has been used to improve the traits of economically important plants. TGE has emerged as a novel plant-breeding tool that represents an alternative approach to classical breeding, but with higher mutagenic efficiency. Here, we briefly describe the basic principles of TGE and the types of engineered nucleases utilized, along with their advantages and disadvantages. We also discuss their potential use to improve the traits of horticultural crops through genome engineering.
This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract This study was conducted to investigate the potential use of New Zealand spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides) as a new vegetable crop which will be cultivated in salt-affected soils such as reclaimed areas. New Zealand spinach ecotypes native to Korea were collected across the Southern, Western and Eastern seashore regions of the Korean peninsula, among which fifty-five accessions were later further propagated and evaluated genetically by using an AFLP (amplified fragment length polymorphism) marker. Based on the AFLP analysis performed to uncover the genetic diversity of the collected ecotypes, enzymatic cleavage of the extracted DNA was implemented based on 12 EcoRI and MseI combinations. A total of 1,279 alleles (107 alleles per EcoRI and MseI enzyme combination) were successfully amplified, among which 62 alleles per enzyme combination were polymorphic (58%). The AFLP analysis indicated that the rate of genetic dissimilarity was 29% among the New Zealand spinach collections, which were clustered into the 7 genetic diversity group. This is the first report on the genetic variation in the genus Tetragonia, and the basic information can be applied to select parental lines for enhancing the segregation spectrum of the new halophytic vegetable plant grown in salt-affected areas.
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