CRISPR technology is revolutionizing the improvement of tomato and other fruit crops

Abstract

Fruits are major sources of essential nutrients and serve as staple foods in some areas of the world. The increasing human population and changes in climate experienced worldwide make it urgent to the production of fruit crops with high yield and enhanced adaptation to the environment, for which conventional breeding is unlikely to meet the demand. Fortunately, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) technology paves the way toward a new horizon for fruit crop improvement and consequently revolutionizes plant breeding. In this review, the mechanism and optimization of the CRISPR system and its application to fruit crops, including resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, fruit quality improvement, and domestication are highlighted. Controversies and future perspectives are discussed as well.

Perspectives of CRISPR/Cas-mediated cis-engineering in horticulture: unlocking the neglected potential for crop improvement

“…We need to continuously improve horticultural commodities to meet the rising demand for food and ornamental production. The widespread applications of CRISPR/Cas technologies in horticultural crops open the possibility for accelerating new variety development [12][13][14][15][16][17] . Engineering cis-regulatory regions using CRISPR/Cas allows the creation of novel variants, resulting in quantitative variation, and thus holds great potential for creating phenotypic diversity.…”

“…Despite the importance of regulatory changes in genes, the application of CRISPR/ Cas-mediated cis-engineering has only been explored sporadically. The genome sequence for at least 181 horticultural species is available 11 and genome editing has been used to generate primarily knockout mutations in at least 25 of them [12][13][14][15][16][17] . These achievements demonstrate the feasibility of applying CRISPR/Cas-mediated cisengineering to expand the phenotypic diversity of many horticultural crops.…”

Safety Aspects of Genetically Modified Lactic Acid Bacteria

“…However, the EU courts recently categorized new genome editing methods as subject to a 2001 directive, which thus defines them as GMO [179,180]. On the contrary, in the USA, a step toward application of next generation techniques has been made, with the use of Cas9-edited plants now allowed [181]. New legislation perspectives on the classification of new engineering techniques are required in the EU to allow the use of improved LAB strains that carry beneficial characteristics and novel functions.…”

Gene editing in plants: assessing the variables through a simplified case study

“…Aside from the amazing potential for gene editing as a diagnostic tool and perhaps even a treatment for many debilitating diseases (Ortiz-Virumbrales et al 2017;Reczek et al 2017;Zabinyakov et al 2017), the potential possible uses of this technology in plants and livestock animals is similarly impressive (Lamas-Toranzo et al 2017). Creation of disease-resistant and less allergenic food crops (Hummel et al 2018;García-Molina et al 2019) with enhanced nutrient profiles (Wang et al 2019) is now within our reach; the future implications for feeding a progressively larger world population are immense.…”