CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing as a precision tool for accelerating vegetable breeding and crop improvement

Abstract

Meeting the increasing demand for safe, nutritious, and climate-resilient food requires innovative strategies to enhance vegetable productivity and quality while overcoming the limitations of conventional breeding. Vegetables are vital sources of essential nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and bioactive compounds; however, their genetic improvement remains constrained by long generation cycles, complex reproductive biology, and labor-intensive selection processes. Therefore, modern breeding practices are needed on an urgent basis to speed up the generation time of vegetable cultivars. The emerging genome editing techniques complement conventional breeding approaches by enabling the rapid development of improved cultivars with targeted agronomic, nutritional and stress resilience traits. Among genome editing tools, the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) /CRISPR-associated protein-9 (Cas9) genome editing technique has received extensive attention in recent years due to its precise and highly efficient editing in genomes. This review provides a critical assessment of recent advances in CRISPR/Cas9-mediated vegetable improvement, with emphasis on applications in yield enhancement, nutritional quality improvement, abiotic and biotic stress tolerance, and de novo domestication. Furthermore, we highlight the emerging integration of CRISPR/Cas9 with speed breeding and artificial intelligence (AI)-guided target selection as a next-generation breeding strategy to accelerate gene discovery, improve editing precision, shorten generation cycles, and facilitate the development of transgene-free (T-DNA-free) elite vegetable cultivars. We also critically evaluate the current bottlenecks in vegetable genome editing and discuss future opportunities for integrating advanced genome editing technologies, AI-enabled approaches, and accelerated breeding pipelines to overcome these challenges and facilitate the development of sustainable, climate-resilient vegetable crops.