TILLING in the era of precise genome editing

Abstract

To feed the ceaselessly growing population, it is challenging to increase the food productivity with limited land and water resources under changing climatic regimes. Conventional breeding has played vital role in increasing the crop productivity however takes long time and is labor intensive. Later, the transgenic technology came in to existence and played an important role for increased crop production. However, due to the regulatory hurdles in several countries including India, restricted extensive commercialization of genetically modified (GM) crops was possible. Therefore, more emphasis is now needed towards non-GM techniques for crop improvement. Now-a-days, genome editing (GE) techniques are also employed in crop improvement projects because of its simplicity, robustness and high efficiency. Parallel to GE, TILLING (Targeting Induced Local Lesions IN Genome) which is a type of random GE can be used as a non-transgenic approach, which involves developing a large mutant population in wide range of crops and screening the population for mutants. Once a mutant population is produced, it can be TILLed any number of times. Therefore, TILLING is a rapid, simple, low cost, effective, high-throughput and is independent of genotype and genome size. In this review, we focused on the potential and application of TILLING technique in crop improvement programs, in the era of precise genome editing.