Experts from China and Germany published a review about the impact of novel plant breeding techniques on boosting cereal crops' production. The open-access article is released in Plants journal.

Cereals are the major source of human food globally. With the continuously increasing demand for food, changing climate conditions, and prevalence of diseases, cereal production has been a challenge. Thus, researchers have been finding ways to improve production using conventional techniques. However, such approaches require long periods of time and additional inputs to develop improved varieties. With the recent developments in genome editing, there is also an increase in the possibility of precise and faster crop improvement. These techniques include CRISPR-Cas9, CRISPR-Cpf1, prime editing, base editing, dCas9 epigenetic modification, and several other transgene-free genome editing approaches.

According to the review article, these technologies have led to revolutionary developments and researchers have quickly attained remarkable achievements. However, these tools are often linked with various bottlenecks that prevent the scaling development of new varieties that can be dealt with by integrating the genome editing tools with the improved conventional breeding methods such as speed breeding, which would take plant breeding to the next level. The review also summarizes the traditional, molecular, and integrated approaches to speed up the breeding procedure of cereals.

Read the article in Plants.