Genome Editing in Fruit Tree Crops

Fruit trees are very valuable products providing food, energy, nutrition and medicine to humans. CRISPR/Cas9 technique has the power to further augment and alter the important agronomic traits of plants such as fruit quality, fruit shelf life and stress tolerance. The flexibility, simplicity and precise nature of this tool help researchers to get high efficiency, accuracy and control on genomic/genetic engineering technology. Successful use of CRISPR/Cas9 tool in horticulture fruits and vegetable crops has demonstrated the worth of this technology for generating null mutations in the first generation, eliminating the lengthy process of several generational crosses to get homozygous knockouts. Larger genome size, complexity, polyploidy and high heterozygosity in fruit tree crops are big challenges, giving CRISPR a chance for genome editing because the potential and efficiency of CRISPR/Cas9 can be exploited for allele-specific editing.