Agro-Ecology and Crop Science

Gene-editing system

The discovery of gene-editing systems (such as CRISPR-Cas9) has revolutionized our ability to both understand and genetically modify both plants and animals .For crops, new alleles can be generated and introduced directly into a cultivar of choice, leaping over the time-consuming process of making multiple crosses to combine desirable traits in the progeny. Department of agriculture introduce Gene editing creates the potential to identify and implement new traits in the field on a much faster timescale. Traditional plant breeding is slow and tedious as it can only exploit the limited quantitative trait alleles found in wild relatives, and then it can take between 7 to 12 years to utilize conventional methods to develop a new cultivar (Baenziger et al., 2006). The ability to fine-tune the expression of a quantitative trait locus rather than utilizing only what is available in wild relatives has already shown promise as a way to increase yield. For example, researchers edited genes in three pathways that contribute to productivity in tomato plants-plant architecture, fruit size, and inflorescence to rapidly produce alleles that alter their promoters. The Knowledge of these “hitchhiking genes” is a necessary first step toward their eventual modification or elimination by gene-editing methodologies.