Wheat genomics and genome editing

Abstract Wheat is an important staple crop cultivated throughout the world. It has a complex genome with multiple copies of a gene. Due to the growing world population and increasing food demand, it is the need of time to increase the production capability of wheat crop. Apart from that climate change with sudden floods and drought conditions, serious attention is needed with modification in wheat. The genome of bread wheat contains dwarfing genes, a large amount of repetitive DNA, functional protein-coding gene, and rust resistance genes. Several strategies have been in use for improving the quality and production of wheat, and success has been achieved with these approaches. In situ hybridization helped to get improved bread wheat. Nowadays, genome editing at gene level has been started with approaches like zinc-finger nucleases, transcription activator-like effector nuclease, and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. These approaches have been successfully used in editing wheat genome to get heritable variations for creating diversity and precision breeding.