CRISPR/Cas Genome Editing and Its Applications in Cereal Crop Improvement.
Kaniganti S, Saini H, Chaitanya AK, Hegde N, Shah P
Summary
PubMedWhy it matters This matters because the bread, rice, and corn on your plate could soon come from crops engineered to survive the hotter, drier growing seasons that climate change is bringing — meaning more food security for everyone.
CRISPR is a kind of molecular 'scissors' that lets scientists make very precise changes to a plant's DNA — like editing a typo in a very long book. Researchers are using it to tweak the genes in staple food crops so they grow more grain, pack in more vitamins, or shrug off harsh weather. This review maps out how far that work has come and what still needs to happen before these improved crops make it from the lab into farmers' fields.
chevron_right Technical Details
Scientists are using a powerful gene-editing tool called CRISPR to improve major food crops like rice, wheat, corn, and barley — making them higher-yielding, more nutritious, and better able to survive drought, heat, and disease.
Key Findings
Multiple CRISPR tools — including Cas9, Cas12, Cas13, base editing, and prime editing — have all been successfully applied to cereal crop improvement, giving researchers a growing toolkit rather than a single approach.
Genome editing has been used to improve yield, stress tolerance (drought, heat, disease), and grain nutritional quality across four major cereals: rice, wheat, maize, and barley.
The review identifies trait complexity, regulatory hurdles, and the gap between lab results and real-world field performance as the key remaining challenges before gene-edited cereals reach commercial farming.
Abstract Preview
CRISPR/Cas-based genome editing has emerged as a transformative tool for precise genetic improvement of cereal crops. Recent advances in CRISPR technologies, including Cas9, Cas12, Cas13, base edit...
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