Unraveling the promise and limitations of CRISPR/Cas system in natural product research: Approaches and challenges

An incredible array of natural products is produced by plants that serve several ecological functions, including protecting them from herbivores and microbes, attracting pollinators, and dispersing seeds. In addition to their obvious medical applications, natural products serve as flavoring agents, fragrances, and many other uses by humans. With the increasing demand for natural products and the development of various gene engineering systems, researchers are trying to modify the plant genome to increase the biosynthetic pathway of the compound of interest or blocking the pathway of unwanted compound synthesis. The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/Cas9 has had widespread success in genome editing due to the system's high efficiency, ease of use, and accuracy which revolutionized the genome editing system in living organisms. This study highlights the method of the CRISPR/Cas system, its application in different organisms including microbes, algae, fungi, and also higher plants in natural product research, and its shortcomings and future prospects.