Genome Editing to Improve Abiotic Stress Responses in Plants

Targeted modification of specific genes via genome editing is now used routinely to modify plant genomes. In developing new mutations in plant genomes using the widely used CRISPR/Cas9 system, it is important for further use in plant molecular studies and crop breeding that the mutations generated are heritable. To date, several improvements to increase efficiency and specificity have been developed to generate heritable mutations in various plant species. In this chapter, we focus on strategies to improve genome editing technology to increase heritability in plants, and summarize the process used to generate new mutant alleles of environmental stress response genes in plants. Such studies suggest further applications in molecular breeding to improve plant function using optimized plant CRISPR/Cas9 systems.