Centre of Excellence in Molecular Biology, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan.
Funct Integr Genomics. 2024 Jul 30;24(4):132. doi: 10.1007/s10142-024-01405-z.
Multiple abiotic stresses like extreme temperatures, water shortage, flooding, salinity, and exposure to heavy metals are confronted by crop plants with changing climatic patterns. Prolonged exposure to these adverse environmental conditions leads to stunted plant growth and development with significant yield loss in crops. CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing tool is being frequently employed to understand abiotic stress-responsive genes. Noteworthy improvements in CRISPR-Cas technology have been made over the years, including upgradation of Cas proteins fidelity and efficiency, optimization of transformation protocols for different crop species, base and prime editing, multiplex gene-targeting, transgene-free editing, and graft-based heritable CRISPR-Cas9 approaches. These developments helped to improve the knowledge of abiotic stress tolerance in crops that could potentially be utilized to develop knock-out varieties and over-expressed lines to tackle the adverse effects of altered climatic patterns. This review summarizes the mechanistic understanding of heat, drought, salinity, and metal stress-responsive genes characterized so far using CRISPR-Cas9 and provides data on potential candidate genes that can be exploited by modern-day biotechnological tools to develop transgene-free genome-edited crops with better climate adaptability. Furthermore, the importance of early-maturing crop varieties to withstand abiotic stresses is also discussed in this review.
作物面临着气候变化引起的多种非生物胁迫，如极端温度、缺水、洪涝、盐度和重金属暴露。长时间暴露在这些不利的环境条件下会导致植物生长和发育受阻，作物产量显著下降。CRISPR-Cas9 基因组编辑工具经常被用于研究非生物胁迫响应基因。近年来，CRISPR-Cas 技术取得了显著的改进，包括提高 Cas 蛋白的保真度和效率、优化不同作物物种的转化方案、碱基编辑和先导编辑、多重基因靶向、无转基因编辑和基于嫁接的可遗传 CRISPR-Cas9 方法。这些进展有助于提高对作物非生物胁迫耐受性的认识，这可能有助于开发敲除品种和过表达系，以应对气候变化模式的不利影响。本文综述了迄今为止使用 CRISPR-Cas9 鉴定的热、干旱、盐度和金属胁迫响应基因的机制理解，并提供了可用于现代生物技术工具开发具有更好气候适应性的无转基因基因组编辑作物的潜在候选基因的数据。此外，本文还讨论了早熟作物品种在应对非生物胁迫方面的重要性。
