Genome editing for nutrient use efficiency in crops

Abstract

Plant breeders have concentrated on increasing the yields, and in turn, the production in the last century to meet the increasing food demand, while ignoring the nutrition values of staple food crops. However, the malnutrition pandemic showed us that plant breeding should also focus on enhancing the nutritional quality of staple foods. Therefore, crop biofortification is one of the major goals of today's agriculture to eliminate malnutrition in the world. There are different strategies of crop biofortification, ranging from conventional to molecular breeding to transgenics. On the one hand, crop breeding seems to be a logical strategy to develop new nutritious varieties, but it takes much longer and requires manpower. On the other hand, transgenic technologies can shorten the time to develop new varieties and require less effort. Even though the obvious advantages of the transgenic technologies, transgenic crop varieties cannot be taken to the market because of strong public opposition. For this very reason, genome editing can facilitate transgene-free variety production. CRISPR/Cas-based genome editing has been used in many aspects of plant science to understand the function of the gene(s), to develop stress-tolerant varieties, and of course to develop biofortified crops. This chapter describes crop biofortification studies using conventional transgenic and genome editing technologies.