TILLING: an alternative path for crop improvement

Abstract

Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, spread of insects and diseases, and slow development of crop varieties acclimatized to new environments have produced a food crisis situation in some developing countries. Although transgenic technologies came to the rescue, they faced numerous hurdles on the journey to reach the farm soil, which has necessitated innovation of out-of-the-box technologies for crop improvement. One such non-transgenic method, which exploits the ever-increasing sequence data and combines it with traditional and modern methods to induce and extract mutants, is Targeting Induced Local Lesions IN Genomes (TILLING). With the success of TILLING in monocots, dicots, autopolyploids, allopolyploids, and triploids, we expect this technique to help develop many mutant crop varieties in the next few decades. We trust this review will be useful for researchers engaged in crop improvement around the globe.