Gene editing to improve stress resilience in wheat

Abstract

Water deficit, salinity, and low-temperature stresses negatively affect wheat production worldwide, underscoring the need to develop stress-tolerant wheat varieties. This can be achieved by modifying the stress response mechanisms and regulations in plants. The recent DNA-editing approach, CRISPR/Cas editing, can accurately modify transcriptional and translational elements in organisms, thereby manipulating molecular processes. They have been used to generate mutants in plants and animals with loss-of-function, allowing rapid study of gene function. The most recent advance in editing involves modifying protein translation by editing non-coding regulatory elements, such as promoters, 5ʹ untranslated regions (UTRs), and upstream open reading frames (uORFs). This strategy is now being applied to change the turnover of specific proteins essential for the expression of traits in plants and animals. For plants, altering these proteins can change the molecular functions they are involved in, leading to changes in phenotypic expression that can translate into new agronomic traits or improvements of existing desirable ones. For wheat, one such trait is tolerance to abiotic stresses, which can be obtained by altering the translation of stress-responsive transcription factors (TFs).