Tissue-culture free gene editing in plants using virus-induced gene editing: a brief overview

CRISPR/Cas-based gene editing techniques have proven their potential for precise manipulations in the plant genome. However, conventional delivery of CRISPR/Cas relies on Agrobacterium-mediated transformation or protoplast-mediated direct transformation of RNP complexes, which is laborious and time-consuming and relies on plant tissue-culture. Virus-mediated delivery of CRISPR/Cas components (sgRNA and Cas9) has been optimized to be rapid and efficient, utilizing the virus's natural ability to infect plants. Virus-induced gene editing (VIGE) has successfully been used to edit various genes in different plants and has provided a guideline for its applications. Recently, reports have shown that VIGE has successfully induced heritable mutations in plants, which were used to generate mutated plants without the need for tissue-culture. In this review, we briefly described the VIGE, followed by the small size nucleases which can be used for VIGE. Further we discuss the developed virus vectors and emphasized the tissue-culture free gene editing in plants. We highlighted the recent advances in achieving heritable gene editing using VIGE followed by its applications, advantages, and disadvantages. Finally, we discussed the future perspectives and the regulatory aspects associated with VIGE.