Tweaking genome-editing approaches for virus interference in crop plants

Abstract

Plant viruses infect various economically important crops and cause a serious threat to agriculture. As of now, conventional strategies employed are inadequate to circumvent the proliferation of rapidly evolving plant viruses. In this regard, recent advancement in genome-editing approach looks promising to produce plants resistant to DNA/RNA virus infections. Clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats (CRISPR) system has been emerged as a promising genome-editing tool that has received special interest because of its ease, competence and reproducibility. Recent studies have demonstrated that CRISPR/Cas9 system has great potential to confer plant immunity by either directly targeting or cleaving the viral genome in both RNA and DNA viruses. Similarly, the approach can be used for targeting the host susceptibility genes more particularly in case of RNA viruses. In the present review, different approaches and strategies being used to improve plant resistance against devastating viruses are discussed in view of recent advances in CRISPR systems. This review also describes the major pitfalls of CRISPR/Cas9 system that utilizes highly efficient and novel platforms to engineer interference to single and multiple plant RNA viruses.

Keywords: CRISPR/Cas9; Genome editing; Plant virus; Virus resistance.