The power and versatility of genome editing tools in crop improvement

• 作者: Lanqin Xia Kejian Wang Jian-Kang Zhu
• 来源期刊: 植物学报（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2021,（9）
• 所属期刊栏目: Editorial
• 页码范围: 1591-1594
• 页数: 4页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

Increasing world population, global climate change, de-creased farmland, environmental pollution and ecological deterioration represent unprecedent challenges for crop production to ensure global food security (Hickey et al., 2019;Li et al., 2021a). It is estimated that by the year 2050, 50％more food is needed to feed the increasing population (Bailey-Serres et al., 2019). Thus, it is urgent to boost crop production by using cutting-edge technologies. Genome editing technologies have revolutionized the plant research field and offer great potential in crop improvement (Ma et al., 2015; Li et al., 2021b; Zhan et al., 2021). Of the several ge-nome editing technologies, clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and its associated Cas protein (CRISPR/Cas), has become the dominant one in the past several years because it is simple, efficient and cost-effective.