Karkute Suhas G, Singh Achuit K, Gupta Om P, Singh Prabhakar M, Singh Bijendra
Division of Vegetable Improvement, ICAR-Indian Institute of Vegetable ResearchVaranasi, India.
Division of Quality and Basic Sciences, ICAR-Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley ResearchKarnal, India.
Front Plant Sci. 2017 Sep 22;8:1635. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2017.01635. eCollection 2017.
Horticultural crops are an important part of agriculture for food as well as nutritional security. However, several pests and diseases along with adverse abiotic environmental factors pose a severe threat to these crops by affecting their quality and productivity. This warrants the effective and accelerated breeding programs by utilizing innovative biotechnological tools that can tackle aforementioned issues. The recent technique of genome editing by Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats/CRISPR associated 9 (CRISPR/Cas9) has greatly advanced the breeding for crop improvement due to its simplicity and high efficiency over other nucleases such as Zinc Finger Nucleases and Transcription Activator Like Effector Nucleases. CRISPR/Cas9 tool contains a non-specific Cas9 nuclease and a single guide RNA that directs Cas9 to the specific genomic location creating double-strand breaks and subsequent repair process creates insertion or deletion mutations. This is currently the widely adopted tool for reverse genetics, and crop improvement in large number of agricultural crops. The use of CRISPR/Cas9 in horticultural crops is limited to few crops due to lack of availability of regeneration protocols and sufficient sequence information in many horticultural crops. In this review, the present status of applicability of CRISPR/Cas9 in horticultural crops was discussed along with the challenges and future potential for possible improvement of these crops for their yield, quality, and resistance to biotic and abiotic stress.
园艺作物是农业的重要组成部分，关乎粮食及营养安全。然而，多种病虫害以及不利的非生物环境因素会影响这些作物的品质和产量，对其构成严重威胁。这就需要利用创新生物技术工具开展有效且加速的育种计划，以解决上述问题。近期出现的成簇规律间隔短回文重复序列/CRISPR相关蛋白9（CRISPR/Cas9）基因组编辑技术，因相较于锌指核酸酶和转录激活因子样效应物核酸酶等其他核酸酶而言具有简便性和高效性，极大地推动了作物改良育种工作。CRISPR/Cas9工具包含一种非特异性的Cas9核酸酶和一条单向导RNA，该单向导RNA将Cas9引导至特定的基因组位置，造成双链断裂，随后的修复过程会产生插入或缺失突变。这是目前反向遗传学以及众多农作物改良中广泛采用的工具。由于许多园艺作物缺乏再生方案和足够的序列信息，CRISPR/Cas9在园艺作物中的应用仅限于少数作物。在本综述中，我们讨论了CRISPR/Cas9在园艺作物中的应用现状，以及在提高这些作物产量、品质以及抗生物和非生物胁迫能力方面可能面临的挑战和未来潜力。
