Genome Editing for Sustainable Agriculture in Africa
Background
Sustainable intensification of agriculture in Africa is essential for accomplishing food and nutritional security and addressing the rising concerns of climate change. There is an urgent need to close the yield gap in staple crops and enhance food production to feed the growing population. In order to meet the increasing demand for food, more efficient approaches to produce food are needed. All the tools available in the toolbox, including modern biotechnology and traditional, need to be applied for crop improvement. The full potential of new breeding tools such as genome editing needs to be exploited in addition to conventional technologies. Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated protein (CRISPR/Cas)-based genome editing has rapidly become the most prevalent genetic engineering approach for developing improved crop varieties because of its simplicity, efficiency, specificity, and easy to use.
Tripathi, L., Dhugga, K. S., Ntui, V. O., Runo, S., Syombua, E. D., Muiruri, S., … & Tripathi, J. N. (2022). Genome editing for sustainable agriculture in Africa. Frontiers in Genome Editing, 4.