Applications of genome editing in plant virus disease management: CRISPR/Cas9 plays a central role

Abstract

Plant viruses infect a wide variety of economically important crop plants and cause significant loss in agricultural production around the world. Conventional control strategies are insufficient to combat rapidly evolving plant viruses. In recent years, genome editing technologies have paved new ways for manipulating viral genomes (DNA or RNA). Among them, the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) and CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9) system has been seen to be able to engineer plant virus resistance by directly targeting the viral genome as well as by inactivating host susceptibility genes. In this review, we survey genome editing tools targeting viral genomes, with an emphasis on CRISPR/Cas9. The advantages of the CRISPR/Cas9 system for combating plant viruses as well as its limitations are discussed in detail.