Journal of Taiwan Agricultural Research

Author:Shuen-Chi You, Yi-Wen Wang, Su-Yu Lin, Jau-Yueh Wang, and Da-Gin Lin*

Abstract:

    Extreme weather caused by global warming could lead to increase of crop diseases, reduction of crop yield and food crisis. It is a top research priority to improve plant stress tolerance for the adaptation of weather extremes and food security. Plant breeding has been devised for improving crop varieties by backcross or hybridization. However, the limitation of distant hybridization and loss of genetic diversity make the breeding program difficult, and the selection of crop improvement through conventional plant breeding is inefficient and unpredictable. Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated protein 9 (CRISPR/Cas9) as a powerful gene editing tool has received a great degree of attention since its establishment on eukaryote. Compared with the previous gene editing technology, the CRISPR-Cas9 system is an easy to use and low-cost requirement tool. More importantly, the efficiency and accuracy of CRISPR/Cas9 system on target gene editing makes it as a widely used tool in animal, plant and human. CRISPR/Cas9 as a revolutionary plant breeding tool can facilitate precision crop improvement by controlling the gene function accurately. To provide a concept for follow-up researcher or breeding experts, we review the history of CRISPR/Cas9 system and its genome-editing mechanism. We also describe the current progress and the potential application for crop improvement.

Key words:Genome editing, CRISPR/Cas9, gRNA, Crop breeding

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