Crop Improvement Using CRISPR/Cas9 Systems: Advances and Challenges

With a rapid increase in the human population, agriculture is facing immense pressure to increase crop productivity, resilience, and sustainability under changing climatic conditions. More often than not, traditional crop improvement methods, including hybridization and selection, are often time-consuming and inconsistent processes. However, biotechnology provides a solution to address these problems through generating genetically modified organisms, which are both expensive and responsible for a well-propagated controversy. Recent advancements in genome-editing technologies, especially clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9), offer new and highly efficient strategies for editing crop genomes at low cost. CRISPR/Cas9 provides targeted modifications in plant genomes with minimal off-target effects, showing enhancement of traits such as crop yield, nutritional quality, and disease resistance. This review is focused on the recent advancements in CRISPR/Cas9 technology, its applications in crop improvement, and the challenges faced in its implementation.