Genome Editing for Crop Improvement (eBook)

Over the last few decades, the agricultural land is decreasing continuously with concurrent rise in human population. Therefore, ensuring food security for all is a major challenge. Therefore, to assist the classical plant improvement interventions, there is an urgent need to develop new methods to improve the crops in a faster, ecologically safer and in a more precise way. There has been a fairly large number of tools available for the targeting and precise editing of plant genomes. In this regard several different technologies, particularly the zinc fingers (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) have been shown to have a high potential to precisely edit the plant genome to improve crop plants. Keeping this in mind the present book was designed to cover all major areas of plant genome editing covering the discovery, types, regulations/policies, challenges, opportunities, and ethical issues associated with genome editing; besides covering more technical parts like bioinformatics tools for genome editing, techniques, off-targeting etc. Moreover, it also covers the editing the plant genomes for some particular traits (resistance against plant pathogens, parasitic weeds or a particular types of stress) or crop types (legumes, model plants, cereals and horticultural crops etc.). Overall, this is book is a wholesome package on genome editing for crop improvement in the form of 16 state-of-the-art edited chapters, written by different researchers/academicians to present up-to-date information on the subject. This book is an excellent study material for the students and the researchers interested to work in the field of genome editing.