Roles of CRISPR to mitigate drought and salinity stresses on plants

Abstract

Agricultural plants have a significant impact on the availability of food and energy for people, but it is deteriorated by numerous abiotic stresses like salinity, and drought due to climate change. These abiotic stresses threaten the food security by reducing crop plants' yields significantly. Breeding abiotic stress-tolerant crop varieties are the most environment friendly and sustainable solution of the problems. These have been developed using conventional plant breeding techniques such as mass selection, pure line selection, bulk method, single seed descent method, plant introduction, development of hybrid varsities, pedigree method, backcross method. However, these techniques are typically laborious and time-consuming. Alternatively, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats associated with Cas endonuclease (CRISPR/Cas) genome editing has become a novel method for precise and effective genetic alteration with plant genomes. Nowadays, many stress tolerant mutants have been developed by using the CRISPR tool. The effect of salinity and drought on plants is highlighted in this review, along with the CRISPR tool's operation and its use in plants to mitigate the effect of aforesaid stresses. We also discuss recently developed techniques and limitations of the CRISPR genome editing tool that can be used to confer salinity and drought.