Genome Engineering for Crop Improvement

16Genome Engineering Strategies for Quality Improvement in Tomato

Tian Wang¹, Hongyan Zhang¹, and Hongliang Zhu²

¹ Key Laboratory of Food Nutrition and Safety of Shandong Normal University, College of Life Science, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China

² College of Food Science and Nutritional Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China

CHAPTER MENU

• 16.1 Introduction
• 16.2 Genome Editing Systems in Plants
  • 16.2.1 ZFNs
  • 16.2.2 TALENs
  • 16.2.3 CRISPRs
• 16.3 Current Applications of Genome Editing in Tomato Improvement
  • 16.3.1 Environmental Adaptation
  • 16.3.2 Fruit Quality
• 16.4 Challenges and Future of Genome Editing in Tomato

16.1 Introduction

Fruits are the main sources of vitamins, and minerals (Giovannoni et al. 2017). They have been cultivated for food and nutritional use throughout the course of human history (Ravichandra 2014). Because of global warming, the growing human population, and natural disasters, an increase of approximately 25–70% above current production levels is needed to meet 2050 food demand (Hunter et al. 2017). With improvement in living standards, people nowadays pay more attention to the quality of fruits. Thus, it is of great need to enhance the yield and quality of fruit crops. To achieve this goal, humans have adopted diverse strategies such as utilization of chemical fertilizers, and hybrid breeding techniques (Yamamoto et al. 2018). However, the overuse of chemical fertilizers leads to salt accumulation and chemical fertilizer ...