Genome Editing Against Bacterial Plant Pathogens

Meeting the crucial demand for sustainable agriculture is an upcoming challenge worldwide, leading to global food security concerns. Approximately 50% of agricultural loss is caused by both biotic and abiotic stresses. As per the estimation of Agrios, 42% of crop loss is characterized by biotic stress alone. Bacteria are the second largest contributor in terms of economic losses caused by various plant diseases. Hence, there is a need to develop elite cultivars in amalgamation with readily available sequenced plant database and progressive genome editing. This has proved to be a groundbreaking/milestone in the field of plant breeding for any desired trait. Until now, many new plant breeding techniques (NPBTs) have been introduced for crop improvement. These techniques include site-specific mutagenesis, cisgenesis, intragenesis, breeding with transgenic inducer lines, etc. This book chapter provides a comparative understanding of enrichment in plant genome editing approach about bacterial pathogens aiming for sustainable agriculture development. This chapter also brings a broad aspect of the application, advantages, unsighted aspects of genome editing, and future challenges.

Keywords: Bacterial plant pathogen, NPBTs, Plant genome editing, Sustainable agriculture.