ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how the game-changing technology, the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat-Cas (CRISPR-Cas)system, can be used to understand plant abiotic stress or develop new crop plant varieties that can perform better under abiotic stress environments. It provides the progress of using the CRISPR-Cas system in developing abiotic stress tolerant crop plants or understanding plant abiotic stress tolerance. Plant abiotic stress response is considered an extremely complicated network of interactions among members of many gene families, transcription factors, and cis-elements. The revolutionary CRISPR-Cas-mediated genome editing tools are expanding exponentially each day. The CRISPR-mediated tools have tremendous potential to be utilized in forward genetic approach, which could, in turn, greatly facilitate functional annotation of abiotic stress responsive genes and regulatory genomic elements. Global climate change is anticipated to pose a severe risk to agrarian profitability around the globe and, consequently, challenges food as well as nutritional security.
