Preeti Choudhary, Muntazir Mushtaq , Anil Kumar Singh, Shazia Mukhtar, Asif Ashraf Shah, Gagan Mehta and Parshant Bakshi
Genome engineering with the RNA-guided CRISPR-Cas9 system in animals and plants is revolutionizing biology. First techniques of genome editing like zinc finger nucleases and synthetic nucleases called TALENs were a starting point but turned out to be expensive, difficult to handle and timeconsuming to engineer, limiting their widespread use, particularly for large scale, high-throughput studies. Moreover, these existing technologies depending on proteins as address labels and customizing new proteins for any new change to introduce in the DNA is a cumbersome process. Of the current generation of genome editing technologies, CRISPR-Cas9 is easier to use and more efficient and can be easily targeted to almost any genomic location of choice by a short RNA guide and has been successfully applied in many organisms, including model and crop plants. Together the system has the ability to detect specific sequences of letters within the genetic code and to cut DNA at a specific point. Simultaneously with other sequence-specific nucleases, CRISPR/ Cas9 has already breach the boundaries and made genetic engineering much more versatile, efficient and easy. There really doesn’t seem to be a limit in applications of CRISPR system extendable from bacteria to complex eukaryotic organisms including plants changing the pace and course of agricultural, Biomedicine and Biotechnological research in the future. This review provides an overview of recent advances in genome editing technologies in plants, and discusses how these can provide insights into current plant molecular biology research and molecular breeding technology.
