Background: The epigenetic mechanisms play critical roles in a vast diversity of biological processes of plants, including development and response to environmental challenges. Particularly, DNA methylation is a stable epigenetic signature that supplements the genetics-based view of complex life phenomena. In crop breeding, the decrease in genetic diversity due to artificial selection of conventional breeding methods has been a long-standing concern. Therefore, the epigenetic diversity has been proposed as a new resource for future crop breeding, which will be hereinafter referred to as epibreeding.
Discussion: The induction of methylome changes has been performed in plants by several methods including chemical drugs treatment and tissue culture. Target-specific epigenetic engineering has been also attempted by exogenous RNAi mediated by virus-induced gene silencing and grafting. Importantly, the new and innovative techniques including the CRISPR-Cas9 system have recently been adopted in epigenetic engineering of plant genomes, facilitating the efforts for epibreeding.
Conclusion: In this review, we introduce several examples of natural and induced epigenetic changes impacting on agronomic traits and discuss the methods for generating epigenomic diversity and site-specific epigenetic engineering.
Keywords: CRISPR; DNA methylation; Epiallele; Epibreeding; Epigenetic recombinant inbred line; Epigenetics.
© 2021. The Genetics Society of Korea.