A New Era in Herbicide-Tolerant Crops Development by Targeted Genome Editing

Abstract

Weeds are one of the biggest problems that modern agriculture is facing worldwide due to the impact they have on crop productivity. Thus, there is a necessity to develop crop varieties with herbicide resistance or tolerance, which would provide cost-effective tools for helping farmers control weeds in the field. Development of herbicide-tolerant crops was initially based on conventional plant breeding and transgenic technology. In recent years, the emerging genome technologies, including ZFNs (zinc-finger nucleases), TALENs (transcription activator-like effector nucleases), and CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat), provide us a new way for crop improvement through precise manipulation of endogenous genes in the plant genomes. Among these, CRISPR technologies, including nuclease systems, base editors, and prime editors, are really promising in creating novel crop germplasms with herbicide tolerance as they are simple, easy to use, and highly efficient. In this review, we briefly summarize the latest development and breakthroughs of CRISPR technologies in creating herbicide-tolerant crops. Finally, we discuss the future applications of CRISPR technologies in developing herbicide-tolerant crops.

Advancements of Breeding and Genomics in Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.): Enhancing Yield and Nutritional Value for Sustainable Agriculture

“…"Base editing has been successfully applied to various crop plants, including rice, maize, soybean, cotton, and oilseeds. Integration of existing base editor types into a single module has enabled the generation of herbicide-resistant rice lines through artificial evolution of the OsACC or OsALS gene" [43]. Directed artificial evolution of agriculturally important genes holds promise for generating novel gene resources to improve crops.…”

Induced Mutation: A New Paradigm in Pulse Weed Control Strategies

“…Researchers have engineered herbicide-tolerant wheat crops by employing zincfinger nucleases (ZFNs) after target the TaALS gene. Likewise, herbicide-tolerant rice and potato varieties have been developed through the use of TALENs, targeting the OsALS1 and SlALS1 genes, respectively [70].…”

“…The discovery of CRISPR/Cas genetic editing tools in 2012 paved the way for significant biotechnological and genomic advancements, enabling the rapid breeding of plants with desired traits such as increased yield, nutritional value, stress tolerance, and resistance to pests and herbicides. Numerous crop varieties, such as rice, maize, soybean, Arabidopsis, tobacco, cassava, flax, potato, and rapeseed [70], have been transformed as herbicide-resistant through the utilization of the CRISPR/Cas system. Despite its simplicity, flexibility, and high specificity, challenges remain in fully realizing the potential of CRISPR/Cas-mediated genome editing for crop improvement.…”

Directions for improvement of the herbicide assortment in Russia at the beginning of the 21st century

“…Since then, the areas planted to GM crops keep on increasing, and so do the concerns of some researchers about safety of such approaches (Zimdahl, 2018;Nishimoto, 2019;Clark, Maselko, 2020;Bourdineaud, 2022). Without going into details of this criticism, the very fact of the development of these technologies is undoubtfully a remarkable milestone in plant protection from weeds (Brookes, 2014;Gosavi et al, 2022;Brunharo et al, 2022).…”