Recent Advances in CRISPR/Cas9 for Climate-Resilient Agriculture in Vegetable Crops

Climate change is now a well-established fact that inevitably affects every aspect of our lives and, most importantly, agriculture. Climate change directly inflicts crop losses due to unprecedented weather extremes, increase in mean 374temperature, precipitation and CO2 level, and the emergence of new diseases and pests. The indirect impact of climate change on crop production can be attributed to the enormous use of irrigation, fertilizers, and chemicals that led to soil erosion and degradation, depletion of soil nutrients and metal toxicity. Vegetables are an important source of nutrition in the human diet, and vegetable cultivation fetches high profit for the farmers. However, vegetable cultivation has suffered losses due to erratic climatic changes over the years. Modern genomic tools like genome editing techniques have revolutionized the pace of crop improvement. Recently, the CRISPR/Cas9 technique has been applied to generate several loss-of-function and gain-of-function mutants for many traits/genes. This chapter provides a brief overview of the role of CRISPR/Cas9based genome editing in improving vegetable crops to meet their biological demand for combating the potential impact of climate change. The chapter discusses the various experimental studies that have explored the power of the CRISPR/Cas9-based genome in producing an array of genomic stocks tolerant to new biotic and abiotic stresses and their usefulness in conventional plant breeding experiments. The chapter has highlighted potential traits and genomic targets for CRISPR/Cas9 application in the development of cultivars and genetic mutants contributing to resilience toward unprecedented flood, drought, thermal stress, and degraded soil health, etc.