Biotic and abiotic stress tolerance through CRISPR-Cas mediated genome editing

摘要

Genome editing is flourishing exponentially and has a great potential to become the dominant technology to manage the abiotic and biotic stress in plants in recent years. The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)-Cas (CRISPR-associated) system is one of the most efficient, convenient and less time-consuming method adopted to achieve successful manipulation of the targeted gene. The RNA guided DNA endonuclease i.e., the Cas9 protein induces site specific double-stranded break initiating DNA repairing mechanism resulting in genome modulation. Plants are vulnerable to phytopathogens like insects, bacteria, virus, fungi etc. in spite of having two levels of defense mechanisms namely PAMP-triggered immunity (PTI), and Effectors-triggered immunity (ETI) responses. CRISPR/Cas9 technology has been exploited to edit the genome in order to improve the plant immunity system for obtaining a long duration resistivity against the pathogen. This review explicates the role of CRISPR-Cas mediated genome editing in plants against different biotic and abiotic factors thereby leading to improved plant vitality and resistivity.