CRISPR/Cas9-Based Genome Editing as a Way Ahead for Inducing Production of Bioactive Metabolites in Endophytes

Natural product research from plants has a long history of contribution in agriculture, human medicine and animal health. The success of targeting and screening novel bioactive secondary metabolites has been elevated manifold with increasing endophyte-related research and development. Numerous studies have documented synthesis of many plant-originated compounds from endo-microbiomes. Genomic editing based on CRISPR/Cas9 technology (CCT) has emerged as a useful tool for enhancing yield of desired metabolites derived from filamentous fungi particularly. With such appropriate genomic insight, biosynthetic genetic cluster can be tagged and identified at an accelerated pace in beneficial microbes. The CCT system concurrently edits multiple genes; thereby making multiple site mutations possible in lesser number of experimentation. This fast-tracked transformation procedure exorbitantly improves the low efficiency of previously known genomic editing methods.