Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat-Caspase System: An Approach with Ability for Crop Improvement |Biomedgrid

Global recent developments and extensive body of evidence have established the fact that crop productivity and yield has declined, and the agricultural sector suffers a huge threat as a result of abiotic and biotic factors. In an attempt to mitigate the challenge of food shortfall, poor plant yield, intolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses and poor adaptability of crops, several methods have been adopted including conventional breeding technologies but has hit a plateau in recent times. However, breakthrough in molecular biology and biotechnology has been demonstrated to provide an improved alternative to the conventional methods for crop improvements. At the present, sequence-specific genome editing technologies particularly the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein9 (Caspase 9) genome editing technology (CRISPR/Cas9) has so far shown the greatest potential in mitigating the emerging challenges in crop improvement. CRISPR/Cas9 technology have been used for specific genome modification in many crops and the progress in CRISPR/Cas9 technology in crop improvement has been outstanding including development of abiotic stress tolerant crop plants, development of disease resistant variety of crop plants, and generation of transgene free genome edited crop plants. There is an expectation that the application of CRISPR/Cas9 technology in variety of crop would revolutionize the agricultural sector in the second green revolution to ensure food and nutritional security of the teeming global population particularly among tropical regions. Therefore, this review provides knowledge on the potentials of CRISPR/Cas9 for crop improvement.