Improvement of floricultural traits in ornamental crops using genome editing tools

Floriculture is one of the most promising sectors of the horticulture industry with immense aesthetic, social, medicinal and economic value. Ornamentals are rich in natural pigments and they belong to diverse groups with distinct biochemical pathways. Recently, genome editing has gained significant attention owing to its potential in modifying the traits in plants. Development of in vitro transformation protocols coupled with availability of gene sequences for commercial traits could accelerate the improvement of cut flowers, particularly, chrysanthemum, rose, lily, freesia, gerbera, tulip, carnation, alstroemeria, hydrangea and lisianthus. In this review, we discussed about basic mechanism of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats–CRISPR-associated (CRISPR-Cas) systems, its types and its potential in accelerating breeding programmes for improvement of ornamental crops.