Applications of CRISPR Cas9 in crop improvement

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Right from the beginning genetics has always been an interesting field as it gives us an insight into the genetic constitution of our body, which governs nearly each and every trait of an organism via the central dogma of life. Since the 1970s scientists have made several attempts at genetic manipulation in plants and different organisms to tackle some of the most harmful diseases like cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, and many more. One of the most advanced techniques in this field is CRISPR Cas9 which is the easiest, cheapest, and fastest as compared to others. CRISPR Stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats which can be characterized as one of the main parts of the Bacterial Immune system to prevent itself from attacks by viruses. The working of CRISPR Cas9 can be understood by the mechanism that when a virus attacks a bacteria by injecting its DNA into the cell, the CRISPR System makes a double-stranded cut in the viral DNA at specific points and integrating that part into its genome, performing a function of Genetic Vaccination to prevent any further attack from the similar strain. This natural system can easily be controlled by humans by guiding the Cas9 Protein with the help of an mRNA to cut the DNA at our choice of points and thus making gene editing much easy as compared to the past.



Talking about the applications, CRISPR can be used to treat several genetic diseases in humans as well as livestock by deleting or switching off the causing gene. It has a tremendous scope in Agriculture science in the areas of mutation breeding, crop improvement, climate-resilient agriculture, biofortification, and the making of model plants to understand the complex genetic crops like wheat. In the field of medicine, it can be used to treat the genetic disease at the embryonic stage to solve any complexities at a later stage.



Some examples of such applications include the browning-resistant mushrooms, low-nicotine tobacco, high-amylopectin waxy corn (Zea mays), and false flax (Camelina sativa) with enhanced omega-3 oil, etc. which were approved by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in record time. This technology has tremendous impacts on agricultural and horticultural crops like high vitamin C content and resistance to bacterial spot disease in tomato, elimination of gluten for celiac patients in wheat, cold as well as submergence tolerance and blast resistance genotypes in rice, early flowering genotypes in soybean, citrus canker resistance in citrus by knock-out of susceptibility gene, high starch content in potato, resistance to ipomovirus in cucumber.






With a ton of benefits, CRISPR is also surrounded by numerous ethical issues as it can be used to modify human beings like designer babies for more strength, height, and any other desired traits required similar to what has happened with plants in the past and need serious discussions among the scientists and other stakeholders to limit its scope for benefit of the humanity. In conclusion, CRISPR Cas9 a natural bacterial defense system can be a game-changer in the field of Genome Editing to solve mass problems provided handled carefully and precisely for benefit of humankind.

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