Current and Future Prospects of Plant Breeding with CRISPR/Cas

Innovative plant breeding technology is an absolute necessity to enhance agriculture production in order to have an ambition of feeding nutritious food to the ever-increasing population. Current advances in CRISPR/Cas genome editing technology have led to effective targeted changes in most plants that promise to accelerate crop improvement. Here we discussed the discovery of CRISPR/Cas technology, associated manipulations for plant genome editing and its potential applications in the plant breeding. We emphasized mainly on the most essential applications of CRISPR/Cas genome editing in crop improvement, such as crop trait improvement (yield and biotic/abiotic stress tolerance), developments in optimizing gene regulation, strategies for generating virus resistance in plants, and the use of high throughput mutant libraries. Finally, the challenges and opportunities for plant breeding in precision agriculture and its bright future discussed.