Current approaches to the challenge of improving agricultural productivity and global food production rely on traditional plant breeding techniques and transgenic genetic modification (GM). However, these techniques lack precision and require substantial time to develop new crop varieties. Plant genome engineering using sequence-specific nucleases (SSNs) overcomes the limitations of traditional crop improvement technologies by creating plants with novel traits through the targeted modification of plant genomes. Therefore our research area mainly deals with developing a highly efficient and robust TALEN and CRISPR/Cas9 platform in plant cells to enable targeted genome editing as well as employing the developed platform for targeted gene mutagenesis, addition, editing and transcriptional modulation to identify and modify plants traits for high-quality, disease resistance and stress tolerance in crop species.
