Exploration of CRISPR/Cas Toolbox for Developing Climate-Smart Plants. In: Ch. Srinivasarao et al., (Eds). Climate Change and Indian Agriculture: Challenges and Adaptation Strategies

Abstract

The United Nations (UN) General Assembly has declared the year 2020 as the "International Year of Plant Health (IYPH)". Global climate change and hostile man-made activities have signicantly degraded the ecological biodiversity which subsequently put plant health under threat. According to Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the loss in the productivity of food crops is nearly 40 per cent due to environmental stress. Therefore, it is high time to create awareness and focus on the solutions that mitigate the detrimental impacts of climate change on food crops. Genome editing (GE) is a revolutionary technology that enables to edit the genomes of living organisms. Over the past few years, four tools have been studied for GE among which, the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) /CRISPR associated 9 (CRISPR/Cas9) system is extensively employed owing to its simplicity, accuracy and efciency. This chapter focuses on the mechanism, diversity and limitations of CRISPR/Cas9 toolset that has been used to generate climate-resilient crops.