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Genetically modified crop regulations: scope and opportunity using the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing approach

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Abstract

Global demand for food is increasing day by day due to an increase in population and shrinkage of the arable land area. To meet this increasing demand, there is a need to develop high-yielding varieties that are nutritionally enriched and tolerant against environmental stresses. Various techniques are developed for improving crop quality such as mutagenesis, intergeneric crosses, and translocation breeding. Later, with the development of genetic engineering, genetically modified crops came up with the transgene insertion approach which helps to withstand adverse conditions. The process or product-focused approaches are used for regulating genetically modified crops with their risk analysis on the environment and public health. However, recent advances in gene-editing technologies have led to a new era of plant breeding by developing techniques including site-directed nucleases, zinc finger nucleases, and the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR associated protein 9 (Cas9) that involve precise gene editing without the transfer of foreign genes. But these techniques always remain in debate for their regulation status and public acceptance. The European countries and New Zealand, consider the gene-edited plants under the category of genetically modified organism (GMO) regulation while the USA frees the gene-edited plants from such type of regulations. Considering them under the category of GMO makes a long and complicated approval process to use them, which would decrease their immediate commercial value. There is a need to develop strong regulatory approaches for emerging technologies that expedite crop research and attract people to adopt these new varieties without hesitation.

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Abbreviations

Cas:

CRISPR associated protein

CRISPR:

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats

sgRNA:

Single Guide RNA

crRNA:

CRISPR RNA

ZFN:

Zinc Finger Consortium

TALEN:

Transcription activator-like effector nucleases

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Acknowledgements

The authors express gratitude to the Vice-Chancellor of Central University for providing the necessary support of the present work. AK acknowledges the CSIR-UGC for JRF.

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  1. Department of Botany, School of Biological Sciences, Central University of Punjab, Ghudda, Bathinda, 151401, India

    Shweta Gupta, Adarsh Kumar, Rupali Patel & Vinay Kumar

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  1. Shweta Gupta
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  4. Vinay Kumar
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Contributions

VK conceived and designed the present research. VK and SG conducted the experiments. VK analyzed the data. VK, SG, RP and AK wrote the manuscript. All the authors read and approved the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Vinay Kumar.

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Gupta, S., Kumar, A., Patel, R. et al. Genetically modified crop regulations: scope and opportunity using the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing approach. Mol Biol Rep 48, 4851–4863 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11033-021-06477-9

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