Genome Editing with Programmable Nucleases in Crop Plants

Crop improvement requires the constant creation and use of new allelic variants. Conventional breeding can be limited in providing the genes and alleles required to meet the agricultural challenges. In the past decade, Genome editing can accelerate plant breeding by allowing the introduction of precise and predictable modifications directly in an elite background. The most promising utilization of the CRISPR/Cas9 system can be used to generate targeted genome modifications including mutations, insertions, replacements and chromosome rearrangements. The use of CRISPR in agriculture should be considered as simply a new breeding method that can produce identical results to conventional methods in a much more predictable, faster and even cheaper manner.