Abstract

Global crop production needs to double by 2050 to meet the projected demands from rising population. Boosting crop yields to meet these rising demands, rather than clearing more land for agriculture has been highlighted as a preferred solution to meet this goal. The success of conventional breeding relies on the availability of natural genetic variation and beneficial alleles for introgression to pyramid the selected traits into an elite background. However, pyramiding widely dispersed useful genetic variability into commercially cultivated rice cultivars is very time consuming and the availability of such beneficial alleles for rice breeding becomes a bottleneck. With the recent discovery of targeted genome editing using CRISPR/Cas9, it becomes easy to pyramid the required genetic variability into any established rice cultivar directly by targeted genomic sequences alterations; without any requirement of actual rice mutants and the time-consuming plant breeding processes.The CRISPR/Cas9 engineered nuclease system is a powerful, versatile, highly specific genome editing tool for revealing gene function and improving crop plants. CRISPR/Cas9 is a RNA-guided (gRNA) editing platform using the type II clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-associated protein (Cas) system that drives the Cas9 nuclease to a specific targeted sequence within the genome in order to introduce genetic modifications (mutations, insertions or deletions). Several genes were identified in the rice genome that negatively regulate the agronomic trait(s). we proposed to utilize CRISPR/Cas9 technology for selective knockout the genes that negatively regulate the rice plant architecture, yield and productivity.