Abstract
The rapid growth in the human population and increasing environmental fluctuations have created a pressing necessity to develop crops that exhibit greater yields and heightened resilience to climate change. Genome editing mediated by Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein (Cas), hold the potential in addressing these challenges by enabling targeted modifications in the crop genomes, thereby creating novel variations and expediting breeding efforts. The use of genome editing for improving crops is not restricted by narrow genomic diversity or the necessity for multiple breeding generations to select desired alleles. However, the deployment of this technology for editing crop genomes face limitations due to the absence of complete, high-quality reference genomes, limited understanding of possible editing targets, and a lack of functional assays to assess the effect of specific gene edits. To overcome these obstacles, advancements in next-generation sequencing are being utilized at different stages of the genome editing process. These techniques enable the analysis of CRISPR off-target effects, confirmation of gene knockouts, and validation of additional edits. Various high-throughput sequencing methods are presently employed to evaluate the influence of CRISPR/Cas-mediated genome edits on the structure and functionality of genes. When integrated with precise phenotyping and functional genomic studies, genomics is providing novel foundations for designing future crops using genome editing.