Mechanistic insights of CRISPR/Cas‐mediated genome editing towards enhancing abiotic stress tolerance in plants

Abstract

Abiotic stresses such as temperature (high/low), drought, salinity, and others make the environment hostile to plants. Abiotic stressors adversely affect plant growth and development; and thereby makes a direct impact on overall plant productivity. Plants confront stress by developing an internal defense system orchestrated by compatible solutes, reactive oxygen species scavengers and phytohormones. However, routine exposure to unpredictable environmental stressors makes it essential to equip plants with a system that contributes to sustainable agricultural productivity, besides imparting multi-stress tolerance. The sustainable approach against abiotic stress is accomplished through breeding of tolerant cultivars. Though eco-friendly, tedious screening and crossing protocol limits its usage to overcome stress and in attaining the goal of global food security. Advancement on the technological front has enabled adoption of genomic engineering approaches to perform site-specific modification in the plant genome for improving adaptability, increasing the yield and in attributing resilience against different stressors. Of the different genome editing approaches, CRISPR/Cas has revolutionized biological research with wider applicability to crop plants. CRISPR/Cas emerged as a versatile tool in editing genomes for desired traits in highly accurate and precise manner. The present study summarizes advancement of the CRISPR/Cas genome editing tool in its adoption to manipulate plant genomes for novel traits towards developing high-yielding and climate-resilient crop varieties. | INTRODUCTIONPlants, represented as complex organisms, are exposed to a variety of factors (physical or chemical) that infringe strong impact on plant productivity (hindering their maximum performance) and even threaten their survival (Shao et al., 2015;Suzuki et al., 2014;Z. Zhu, Piao, et al., 2016). Of the different factors, drought, salinity, temperature (high or low), and others such as ultraviolet (UV) radiation, heavy metals, etc are prominent and collectively referred to as abiotic stresses (

Advances in Crop Breeding Through Precision Genome Editing

“…Abiotic stresses pose a major threat to the crop yield and productivity. CRISPR/Cas has been adopted rapidly for the manipulation of crop genomes to develop abiotic stress tolerant and high-yielding mutants ( Bhat et al, 2021 ). Simultaneous editing of three genes, OsPIN5b (a panicle length gene), GS3 (a grain size gene) and OsMYB30 (a cold tolerance gene) with the CRISPR-Cas9 resulted in several new rice mutants with high yield and excellent cold tolerance ( Zeng et al, 2020 ; Table 2 ) which was also stable in the T2 generation.…”

Melatonin in Plant Defense against Abiotic Stress

“…under salt stress [178] and in the freshwater Chara australis (L.) [203]. Generally, plants under stress conditions close their stomata to prevent water loss, so affecting stomatal conductance and reducing photosynthesis [8]. However, melatonin increases the stomatal function and permits the reopening of the stomata in plants treated with salt [91], and hence, improves the net photosynthetic rate of plants under salt stress.…”

“…Furthermore, abiotic stresses show progressive development under the current era of global climatic change [5,6] and pose a great threat to sustainability in agriculture worldwide. Often correlated with a decrease in the soil water level, any significant reduction in the cultivable capacity of the soil often occurs with a change in the land use pattern from that typical of a fertile to marginal one [7,8]. It affects growth and development of crop plants via a reduction in germination, a decrease in the photosynthetic activity and carbon assimilation to a large extent, decreased flowering, and pollen sterility, and as such, acts as a major limiting factor for crop yield [9][10][11][12].…”

Adaptation Strategies to Improve the Resistance of Oilseed Crops to Heat Stress Under a Changing Climate: An Overview

“…The temperature fluctuations have made it imperative to develop climate-resilient varieties that display better adaptability for growth under varied environmental conditions (Bhat et al, 2021 ). However, achieving this objective will be complicated by the fact that the performance of oilseeds may be hampered by environmental impacts related to climate change and the associated increase in pests and diseases, which are likely to become more challenging in the near future (Jaradat, 2016 ; Rahman et al, 2019 ).…”