Present and future prospects for wheat improvement through genome editing and advanced technologies

Abstract

Wheat ( Triticum aestivum , 2 n = 6 x = 42, AABBDD) is one of the most important staple food crops in the world. Despite the fact that wheat production has significantly increased over the past decades, future wheat production will face unprecedented challenges from global climate change, increasing world population, and water shortages in arid and semi-arid lands. Furthermore, excessive applications of diverse fertilizers and pesticides are exacerbating environmental pollution and ecological deterioration. To ensure global food and ecosystem security, it is essential to enhance the resilience of wheat production while minimizing environmental pollution through the use of cutting-edge technologies. However, the hexaploid genome and gene redundancy complicate advances in genetic research and precision gene modifications for wheat improvement, thus impeding the breeding of elite wheat cultivars. In this review, we first introduce state-of-the-art genome-editing technologies in crop plants, especially wheat, for both functional genomics and genetic improvement. We then outline applications of other technologies, such as GWAS, high-throughput genotyping and phenotyping, speed breeding, and synthetic biology, in wheat. Finally, we discuss existing challenges in wheat genome editing and future prospects for precision gene modifications using advanced genome-editing technologies. We conclude that the combination of genome editing and other molecular breeding strategies will greatly facilitate genetic improvement of wheat for sustainable global production.

Plant base editing and prime editing: The current status and future perspectives

“…First, continuous efforts in engineering a novel generation of BE and PE as aforementioned will certainly enrich the precision genome editing tools in plants. Second, BEs and PEs, especially PE, are not widely used or even impossible in the polyploid species and agriculturally important food crops such as common wheat due to its complex hexaploidy genome, gene redundancy, as well as relatively lower transformation efficiency (Li et al, 2021c). Third, for base editing and prime editing in different plant species, we suggest using the aforementioned optimized strategies in combination with a stronger promoter to drive the expression of both nCas‐deaminase and the sgRNA for BE, or nCas‐M‐MLV‐RT and pegRNA for PE, respectively (Li et al, 2022b).…”

“…The Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR‐associated (Cas) system, as a a robust, versatile and simple system, has dominated the genome editing field and holds a great potential either for plant functional genomics or crop improvement over the past decade (Gasiunas et al, 2012; Jinek et al, 2012; Knott and Doudna, 2018; Mao et al, 2019; Wang et al, 2019; Xu et al, 2019; Gao, 2021; Huang et al, 2021; Li et al, 2021c; Xia et al, 2021; Zhan et al, 2021; Puchta et al, 2022). To date, three major CRISPR/Cas mediated precision genome editing systems have been developed and successfully applied in plants such as homology‐directed DNA repair (HDR)‐mediated targeted gene replacement or gene targeting (Sun et al, 2016; Li et al, 2019; Li and Xia, 2020; Lu et al, 2020; Chen et al, 2022a; Puchta et al, 2022), base editing (Komor et al, 2016; Nishida et al, 2016; Gaudelli et al, 2017; Li et al, 2017; Lu and Zhu, 2017; Shimatani et al, 2017; Zong et al, 2017; Hua et al, 2018; Wei et al, 2021; Tian et al, 2022) (Figure 1), and prime editing (Anzalone et al, 2019; Butt et al, 2020; Jiang et al, 2020; Hua et al, 2020a; Li et al, 2020c; Lin et al, 2020; Tang et al, 2020; Xu et al, 2020a, 2020c; Lu et al, 2021; Wang et al, 2021b; Perroud et al, 2022) (Figure 2).…”

Wheat Biofortification: Utilizing Natural Genetic Diversity, Genome-Wide Association Mapping, Genomic Selection, and Genome Editing Technologies

“…Exploring natural genetic diversity and broadening the narrow genetic base of hexaploid cultivated wheat varieties is essential and warrants greater attention through whole-genome sequencing of large number of accessions (e.g., the composite core set), and functional genomics for gene discovery associated with agronomic and nutritional traits ( 110 , 111 ). Such efforts could help generate useful genetic information and genomic resources for accelerating wheat improvement through genome editing ( 112 ). Gene editing in germline cells and the CRISPR system carrying RNA interference elements need to be explored in wheat.…”

Grand Challenges in Microalgae Domestication

“…The last lesson from plant domestication may be that growth, productivity, resistance to diseases, etc., can be addressed by domestication strategies, but the response to abiotic environmental stressors, like drought or nutrient scarcity are more difficult questions (Li et al, 2021 ).…”