Salinity Stress Tolerance in Solanaceous Crops: Current Understanding and Its Prospects in Genome Editing

Solanaceous crops are the largest family of crops which is consumed as a vegetable for their nutritional properties such as carbohydrates, resistant starch, antioxidants, vitamins, mineral and nutrient that is beneficial for human health. Among abiotic stresses, salinity is one of the detrimental and prominent stress in the recent scenario of climate change which significantly affects the growth and development of solanaceous crops. Advances in genome editing (GE) has been employed to modify gene of several agronomically important plants. GE with CRISPR/Cas9 (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats and CRISPR-associated protein 9) -based techniques allow for the precise and targeted mutations, opening up the new possibility of using this tool to improve important agronomic and physiological traits. According to this review, the present landscape of CRISPR/Cas9 uses in solanaceous crops, such as tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum) and potatoes (S. tuberosum), has been evaluated. The available literature pertaining to CRISPR/Cas in solanaceous crops hints towards its wider applicability in developing plant tolerant to abiotic stress, especially salinity stress. Therefore, together with advancements in genome and transcriptome sequencing, genomic engineering with CRISPR/Cas9 will aide in the development of salt-tolerant solanaceous crops.