CRISPR-Cas9 based stress tolerance: New hope for abiotic stress tolerance in chickpea (Cicer arietinum)

Plants are subjected to biotic and abiotic stresses regularly, which irreparably harm agricultural production. Eco-friendly and sustainable technology to deal with this challenge is to breed abiotic stress tolerant cultivars. To generate crop plants conferring resistance against stresses, conventional breeding was used in the past, but because of the complex heredity of abiotic stress tolerance traits, such techniques remain insufficient in making greater enhancement. Genome-engineering based on CRISPR-Cas9 (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-CRISPR associated protein9) has shown enormous potential in developing climate-resilient cultivars. Likewise, the development of chickpea transgenic lines by knockout of 4CL and REV7 genes exhibits drought tolerance which establishes a foundation for future studies in chickpea. In addition, the CRISPR-Cas9 system can boost yield potential under abiotic stress situations by producing non-transgenic plants having the required characteristics. This review article discusses the validation of gene function based on the CRISPR-Cas9 for the development of abiotic stress-tolerant crop plants, emphasizing the chickpea to open the new ventures of generating abiotic stress-tolerant chickpea varieties.