Accelerating crop domestication through genome editing for sustainable agriculture

Abstract

With the establishment of human civilization, wild plant species were domesticated and cultivated at their centres of origin and further disseminated in different parts of the world. While being grown in the wild and on farms, innumerable mutations occurred over years creating new variations in their genome. Today’s improved crop plants are the result of years of artificial selection for a few of those mutations, many times coupled with deliberate selection for desirable recombinants that originated in nature or developed through targeted breeding. Artificial phenotypic selection leaves footprints in the genome of crop species. Over the last three decades, researchers have identified numerous genes and causal mutations associated with domestication events, leading to a better understanding of how our forefathers and foremothers tinkered with plant development to meet their food and fodder needs. Our ability to script complex genetic information through efficient genome editing tools has enabled us to take a great leap forward to accelerate crop domestication. In this review, we have discussed how genome editing tools facilitate the domestication of wild and semi-domesticated species, the prerequisites for performing editing in wild genomes, and the potential future target loci for installing domestication syndrome rapidly in wild plant species. Genome editing technologies could help us bring wild and partially domesticated crop plants to mainstream agriculture to sustainably meet our current and future needs.