Le tecniche di genome editing come nuova prospettiva per la domesticazione delle piante

Plant domestication is an old process (dating back to about 12,000 years ago when agriculture was born) through which wild plants are modified in order to obtain specific features that make them more suitable for human use. The process takes a long time and the currently cultivated crop varieties were obtained only after several years of artificial selection. The new genome editing techniques (in particular CRISPR/Cas9) represent an effective alternative to obtain the same or even better results in a very short time by specifically targeting key domestication genes that have been discovered in the last years thanks to several genomic studies. Nowadays, time is a very precious resource as we need to rapidly find out solutions to the problems represented by the increasing population (more food is needed) and by the climate change (new varieties are needed, adapted to the new environmental conditions). Here, I report some examples of how genome editing experiments on tomato, rice, and banana genomes have been successful in improving important features such as yield, nutritional values, and disease resistance. These results demonstrate that genome editing techniques have to be exploited also to perform a totally new approach of plant domestication: to develop new varieties (and possibly even new species) for dealing with current and future world challenges in a sustainable manner.