Engineering cold resilience: implementing gene editing tools for plant cold stress tolerance.

Abstract

Main conclusion: This paper highlights the need for innovative approaches to enhance cold tolerance. It underscores how genome-editing tools can deepen our understanding of genes involved in cold stress. Cold stress is a significant abiotic factor in high-altitude regions, adversely affecting plant growth and limiting crop productivity. Plants have evolved various mechanisms in response to low temperatures that enable resistance at both physiological and molecular levels during chilling and freezing stress. Several cold-inducible genes have been isolated and characterized, with most playing key roles in providing tolerance against low-temperature stress. However, many plants fail to survive at low temperatures due to the absence of cold acclimatization mechanisms. Conventional breeding techniques, such as inter-specific or inter-genic hybridization, have had limited effectiveness in enhancing the cold resistance of essential crops. Thus, it is crucial to develop crops with improved adaptability, high yields and resistance to cold stress using advanced genomic approaches. The current availability of gene editing tools offers the opportunity to introduce targeted modifications in plant genomes efficiently, thereby developing cold-tolerant varieties. This review discusses advancements in gene editing tools, including zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9)/Cas12a(Cpf1), prime editing (PE) and retron library recombineering (RLR). We focus specifically on the CRISPR/Cas system, which has garnered significant attention in recent years as a groundbreaking tool for genome editing across various species. These techniques will enhance our understanding of molecular interactions under low-temperature stress response and highlight the progress of genome editing in designing future climate-resilient crops.