Trait stacking in modern agriculture: application of genome editing tools

Abstract

Advances in plant transgenic technology in the 20th century overcame the major hurdle for transfer of genetic material between species. This not only enabled fundamental insights into plant biology, but also revolutionized commercial agriculture. Adoption of transgenic plants in industrial agriculture has reduced pesticide application, while bringing significant increase in crop yields and farmers' profits. The progress made in transgenic technology over the last three decades paved the way mainly for simple single-gene insect and herbicide tolerance (HT) trait products. Modern agriculture demands stacking and pyramiding of complex traits that provide broad-spectrum insect and HT with other agronomic traits. In addition, more recent developments in genome editing provide unique opportunities to create precise on-demand genome modifications to enhance crop productivity. The major challenge for the plant biotech industry therefore remains to combine multiple forms of traits needed to create commercially viable stacked product. This review provides a historical perspective of conventional breeding stacks, current status of molecular stacks and future developments needed to enable genome-editing technology for trait stacking.

Mini-review: Lipid flippases as putative targets for biotechnological crop improvement

“…Then, plants are crossed to obtain new varieties that stack several desirable traits ( Figure 1A ). This process is slow and depends on the desired traits being genetically compatible with each other ( Chen and Ow, 2017 ; Kumar et al., 2017 ). Thus, a target that allows plants to mount an effective response to more than one kind of stress simultaneously would be an enormous advantage.…”