Application of CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing for abiotic stress management in crop plants

Abstract

Abiotic stresses, including drought, salinity, cold, heat, and heavy metals, extensively reducing global agricultural production. Traditional breeding approaches and transgenic technology have been widely used to mitigate the risks of these environmental stresses. The discovery of engineered nucleases as genetic scissors to carry out precise manipulation in crop stress-responsive genes and associated molecular network has paved the way for sustainable management of abiotic stress conditions. In this context, the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat-Cas (CRISPR/Cas)-based gene-editing tool has revolutionized due to its simplicity, accessibility, adaptability, flexibility, and wide applicability. This system has great potential to build up crop varieties with enhanced tolerance against abiotic stresses. In this review, we summarize the latest findings on understanding the mechanism of abiotic stress response in plants and the application of CRISPR/Cas-mediated gene-editing system towards enhanced tolerance to a multitude of stresses including drought, salinity, cold, heat, and heavy metals. We provide mechanistic insights on the CRISPR/Cas9-based genome editing technology. We also discuss applications of evolving genome editing techniques such as prime editing and base editing, mutant library production, transgene free and multiplexing to rapidly deliver modern crop cultivars adapted to abiotic stress conditions.

Enhancing Crop Resilience to Drought Stress through CRISPR-Cas9 Genome Editing

“…Furthermore, there are some attributes related to the CRISPR technology that needs further refinement to ensure effective and precise genome modifications in plants. These include selection and understanding of preference and accessibility of Cas enzymes, identification of functional sgRNAs without off-target consequences in the genome, and improvements of the delivery technique of CRISPR ingredients [ 77 ]. Newer CRISPR-based techniques are often developed for bacterial and mammalian genome editing before being tested for plant usage [ 78 ].…”

Advanced Biotechnological Interventions in Mitigating Drought Stress in Plants

“…This finding is further corroborated by Chen et al [ 93 ], who observed that the knockout of AITR genes in A. thaliana via CRISPR/Cas9 not only conferred enhanced drought tolerance but also did so without imposing fitness costs, indicating the technology’s potential for precise stress tolerance enhancement without adversely affecting plant growth or productivity. Kumar et al [ 100 ] extended these observations to Solanum lycopersicum (tomato), where CRISPR/Cas9-edited mutants exhibited improved drought stress responses, further validating the utility of this technology in enhancing drought tolerance across different plant species. Tiwari et al [ 101 ] expanded the scope of CRISPR/Cas9 applications by editing GRXS14/15/16/17 genes in tomato, achieving increased tolerance not only to drought but also to a spectrum of abiotic stresses, thereby highlighting the technology’s capacity for instilling multi-stress resilience in crops.…”

Understanding heat tolerance in vegetables: Physiological and molecular insights, and contemporary genomic approaches for enhancing heat stress resilience

“…Similarly, the BRZ1 gene, which positively regulates the production of reactive oxygen species in the apoplastic region of tomatoes for heat tolerance, was edited using CRISPR/Cas9. Mutants of bzr1 exhibited impaired H 2 O 2 production in the apoplast, indicating its significance in temperature tolerance (Kumar et al, 2023). In lettuce, CRISPR/Cas9 was used to knock out the LsNCED4 gene, resulting in increased germination of lettuce seeds under heat stress (Devi et al, 2022).…”