Developing herbicide-resistant crops through genome editing technologies: A review

Weeds are a major problem and pose a serious threat to crop yields and safety. Due to widespread herbicide resistance, herbicide injuries and weed community shifting, it is necessary to develop herbicide-resistant (HR) crops to manage weeds and improve crop yields. Remarkably, genome editing technologies such as zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) and transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), especially clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein (Cas) systems, exhibit great potential in accelerating germplasm development and crop breeding. In this review, we briefly summarize the history of chemical herbicide development and its limitations in weed control in conventional crops, the development and application of various genome editing technologies and methods, including artificial endonucleases, base editors, prime editors as well as directed evolution of endogenous target genes, for generating HR crops. Additionally, we discuss the potential future applications of CRISPR technologies in developing herbicide-resistant crops.