Plant Breeding played a key role in feeding the world population by achieving higher yield with enhanced resistance for biotic and abiotic stresses. Globally 689 million people are living in extreme poverty, and this number is increasingly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa than on other continents due to drought and biotic stresses in agriculture. Conventional breeding approaches take 6-8 years to breed a variety, and linkage drag is one of the major issues in this approach. The genome editing tool CRIPSR holds a massive promise to protect crops against various stressors under the present changing climatic scenarios, and to achieve sustainable crop yield.

New and emerging diseases on several crops pose a risk to food security, global ecosystems and economy. These diseases can be caused by a wide-ranging range of microorganisms which include fungi, bacteria, viruses, and phytoplasmas. Within a few years, emerging diseases have caused severe losses to the farmers leading global economic importance.

For example, rice false smut and sheath rot diseases were considered to be minor and now become major threats in inbred and hybrid rice cultivations across the world. Most of the hybrids from several crops are highly susceptible to emerging diseases which limit the production of higher yield. Therefore, managing new and emerging diseases gains importance by implementing molecular tools to survey the pathogens and develop broad spectrum resistance.

CRIPSR tools provide a fast track gene editing approach and provide benefits to the breeders by target editing of multiple genes (stacking) in popular crop cultivars to increase the productivity, which will be beneficial to small-scale farmers across the globe. Our Research Topic offers to the possibility to authors to submit their original research articles, reviews and opinions covering the following areas:

1. CRISPR editing for emerging biotic stresses
2. CRISPR editing to develop hybrid parental lines
3. CRISPR editing as a breeding tool in crop plants for yield

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Frontiers in Genome Editing

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