CRISPR–Cas technology towards improvement of abiotic stress tolerance in plants

Abstract Abiotic stresses, such as drought, salinity, temperature, and heavy metals, affect plant health, growth, and development and cause significant yield losses worldwide. In this regard, new breeding technologies, for example, genome editing technologies (GETs), provide new opportunities for the development of climate resilient varieties by employing targeted gene editing for specific crop traits. For targeted gene editing the selection of gene is very critical. Mainly, the negative regulators of any desired trait can be targeted via GET such as clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-CRISPR-associated nuclease (Cas) system. Many new verities of different crops have successfully been developed by knocking out the gene/s that facilitate the plant machinery and make the plant more susceptible to abiotic stresses. Thus, in this chapter, we discuss that the CRISPR–Cas system-based gene/s targeting is a robust, efficient, and practical approach for developing crop varieties resilient to drought, salinity, temperature, and/or heavy metals stresses. We also discuss the possibility of commercialization of genome-edited crops in future prospects, and it is hoped that these GETs will have a significant contribution not only toward generating novel stress tolerant plant types but also will support toward the food security.