Improving Horticultural Crops via CRISPR/Cas9: Current Successes and Prospects. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Horticultural crops include a diverse array of crops comprising fruits, vegetables, nuts, flowers, aromatic and medicinal plants. They provide nutritional, medicinal, and aesthetic benefits to mankind. However, these crops undergo many biotic (e.g., diseases, pests) and abiotic stresses (e.g., drought, salinity). Conventional breeding strategies to improve traits in crops involve the use of a series of backcrossing and selection for introgression of a beneficial trait into elite germplasm, which is time and resource consuming. Recent new plant breeding tools such as clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) /CRISPR-associated protein-9 (Cas9) technique have the potential to be rapid, cost-effective, and precise tools for crop improvement. In this review article, we explore the CRISPR/Cas9 technology, its history, classification, general applications, specific uses in horticultural crops, challenges, existing resources, associated regulatory aspects, and the way forward.

published proceedings

  • Plants (Basel)

altmetric score

  • 10.556

author list (cited authors)

  • Bhatta, B. P., & Malla, S.

citation count

  • 11

complete list of authors

  • Bhatta, Bed Prakash||Malla, Subas

publication date

  • January 2020

publisher

published in