Editing crops for a hotter planet: how CRISPR is creating climate-smart agriculture

Md Ishtiaque, Satyam Raj, Rudra Pratap Singh, Abhishek Nath, Satish Kumar

Abstract

Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall and expanding soil salinity are steadily eroding the productivity of the crop varieties farmers rely on today. Conventional breeding can respond, but it usually needs eight to twelve years to move a single useful gene into an elite background. Genome editing based on clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) offers a faster and more targeted route. This article explains how heat, drought and salinity damage plants at the cellular level. It then describes the current editing toolbox of nucleases, base editors, prime editors and expression tuners and reviews genes that have already been edited for climate resilience in rice, maize, wheat, tomato and orphan crops. It also covers the pipeline from candidate gene to field trial, the sharply divergent regulatory positions across countries and the practical limits of single-gene editing for traits that are inherently polygenic.