Genome Editing: A Tool from the Vault of Science for Engineering Climate-Resilient Cereals

In the present scenario, the two global issues are food security and climate change. These issues are due to a lethal combination of various factors, such as increasing world population, shrinking agricultural land, dwindling agricultural resources, and erratic weather patterns. All these factors are an indication of the looming food crisis, which will worsen due to global warming. Environmental changes, such as extremes of temperature, and erratic precipitation patterns negatively alter the plant physiology, metabolism, biochemistry, soil characteristics, and microbe abundance. As a result, a considerable burden is inflicted on each farmer’s spine as well as the field’s productivity. Therefore, to improve the food and nutritional security, the plant biologist and researchers are compelled to aim for quick, sustainable, and eco-friendly technologies that enhance “climate-resiliency” in crops under current agriculture practices. In this aspect, many biology-revolutionizing genome-editing approaches have come into existence since the year 2005. It includes multiple platforms such as clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR/Cas9 and CRISPR/Cpf1), zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), and transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs). Because of the simplicity, high efficiency enabled precise modifications at any genomic loci-of-interest (native endogenous gene or cis/trans-gene insertion), ability to discover novel traits, and accelerate trait development, the plant scientists have created multiple “climate change-resilient crops” especially cereals within their labs. These edited plants have been modified in such a way that they can withstand a broad spectrum of abiotic stresses such as heat, cold, salinity, drought, flood/submergence, pollutants, as well as biotic pests, pathogens, and weeds. As a result, in this chapter, the focus is on enlisting all the successful reports related to the use of genome-editing tools in reshaping the cereals’ climate-resiliency.