Genome Editing in Crops to Control Insect Pests

Abstract

Plants are exposed to several biotic and abiotic stressors. Like other biotic stress factors, insect pests have posed severe concerns regarding yield losses. These pests cause direct and indirect damage to plant growth and development by transmitting several viruses, resulting in significant yield losses. Alterations in traits to improve crops began with breeding techniques followed by genome editing to achieve breeding goals quickly. Recently, several gene-editing strategies are being used in plants, with the continuous emergence of variants showing dramatic effects by engineered nucleases. The efficacy of various editing techniques ranging from endonucleases to CRISPR/Cas in several aspects of plant growth, development, and stress mitigation has been discovered. Advances in genome-editing tools and a better understanding of plant immune responses are required to ensure that a larger number of immunity players may be targeted with a high specificity in the future, resulting in a sustainable approach for agricultural production. This chapter focused on various genome-editing technologies used in plants for resistance to insect pests. The chapter also discusses the implications for evaluating plants that have been developed using genome-editing technology.