(GIST OF KURUKSHETRA) Gene Editing Technology: Transforming Agriculture

(AUGUST-2025)

Gene Editing Technology: Transforming Agriculture

Context:

Gene or genome editing transformative innovative technology which has huge potential in the field of bio-sciences including agriculture. In agriculture, it offers great potential to customise crops with desirable traits for increased productivity and quality; increased resistance to pests and diseases and making plants resilient to stresses being imposed by climate change. The word ‘genome’ refers to the hereditary material of an organism.

Gene Edited Crops: Sustaining Food and Nutritional Security

Staple crops such as rice, wheat, maize, and soybeans are the backbone of global food security, providing the primary source of calories for a large portion of the world’s population.
Just three of them, rice, maize and wheat, provide 60 percent of the world’s food energy intake and are also the staples of over 4,000 million people worldwide. Gene editing technology CRISPR/Cas offers new opportunities to enhance crop yield by directly targeting genes that regulate plant growth and development.
Editing the OsAPL gene which is involved in nutrient transport has been shown to increase yield in rice. Photosynthetic efficiency of the plants can be enhanced by targeting genes involved in chlorophyll synthesis and light capture and this has been done in rice by targeting the gene OsSXKl which improved photosynthetic rates and increased grain yield.
In rice, the technology has also been employed to enhance aromatic qualities by editing the OsBADH2 gene, leading to increased production of 2-acetyl- 1-pyrroline (2-AP), a compound that imparts a desirable fragrance, thereby catering to consumer preferences.
Until now, more than 55 rice genes have been subjected to editing in rice only, using the CRISPR-Cas approach for various traits such as abiotic and biotic stresstolerance, plant architecture, and grain yield. This technology has also played pivotal role in addressing nutritional deficiencies through crop biofortification.
Biofortification aims to increase the content of essential nutrients in crops, thereby improving their nutritional value.

Technology to Manage Biotic and Abiotic Stresses

All foodgrain crops are vulnerable to water scarcity, which poses a major challenge to food security.
Gene editing with CRISPR/Cas technology allows precise genetic modifications to improve drought tolerance by targeting genes that regulate water use efficiency and osmotic balance.
A notable breakthrough in this area is the modification of the ZmHDT103 gene, which has been shown to improve drought tolerance in maize by enhancing the plant’s ability to withstand water scarcity without compromising growth and yield under non-stress conditions.

Gene Editing Technology in Climate Change Mitigation

Gene editing technology-CRISPR could play an important role in mitigating the effects of climate change and global warming. Creator of CRISPR technology-Doudna while highlighting the potential of combination of artificial intelligence and CRISPR, emphasised that creating a methane-free cow in future is possible in our quest to reduce the generation of greenhouse gases in animal husbandry which contribute significantly in exacerbating climate change.
Drought stress is one of the imminent effects of climate change which make serious dent on crop productivity and is the primary cause of productivity loss in agriculture globally. Scientists are now able to create crop varieties which are well adapted to various abiotic stresses including drought and crop lodging in floods.
Other abiotic stresses including salinity, temperature fluctuations (high/low) and the presence of heavy metals in the soil can also be dealt with this technology. Some plant genes enhance the deleterious effects of abiotic stresses, known as sensitivity genes (Se genes) and by disrupting these ‘Se genes’, stress tolerance has been created in several plant species, including grain, vegetable, and fruit crops.
Climate change can increase the severity and likelihood of plant diseases and to counter the threat of such pest resurgence, scientists have been working on conferring disease resistance in livestock and food crops without the use of pesticides and fungicides.
This will help to make significant reduction in the pesticide usage in agriculture as evidenced in the case of Bt cotton. In banana, banana streak virus is activated under stress conditions such as drought and extreme heat prevalent in Africa, particularly in the areas where bananas are widely cultivated as an important food crop.
To counter the problem, researchers from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nairobi, Kenya, made the use of CRISPR gene editing technology to deactivate banana streak virus in plantains. In general, gene-edited plants can play a crucial role in carbon sequestration, capturing and storing atmospheric CO2 more efficiently.

Simplified Regulatory Framework

Use of genome editing technology based on CRISPR- Cas, makes precise changes in the organism’s genetic material without adding any foreign DNA. Hence, these are not genetically modified crops because no foreign DNA has been added to the original genome of the crops thus making them safe in comparison to genetically modified (GM) crops where foreign DNA is added which raises some questions about GM crops.
Organisms naturally perform such programmed, targeted and adaptive rearrangements of their own DNA sequences and notable examples include the vertebrates which employ programmed and targeted DNA rearrangements to enhance their immune responses and natural CRISPR spacer arrays in bacteria, which recognise and cleave foreign DNA of invading viruses. Thus, the genetic changes that are introduced by CRISPR-Cas technology do not differ from the changes that can occur naturally or result from conventional breeding.

Conclusion:

As this technology has potentiality to achieve food and nutritional security with the almost stagnant or decreasing cultivated area, the associated risks should also be in focus for their possible solutions. The quest for high yield and quality traits in crops will continue to keep pace with surging demand and population. But we need to always remember the words of the ‘Father of Green Revolution’ and Nobel Laureate Dr. Norman Ernest Borlaug that ‘the revolution in plant genetics is the only way to significantly increase the food production to meet the needs of the growing population in the coming decades.’ Gene editing is certainly a revolution in plant genetics with CRISPR/Cas9 as an innovative tool.