Current Status and Perspectives on the Application of CRISPR/Cas9 Gene-Editing System to Develop a Low-Gluten, Non-Transgenic Wheat Variety

Wheat gluten contains epitopes that trigger celiac disease (CD). A life-long strict gluten-free diet is the only treatment accepted for CD. However, very low-gluten wheat may provide an alternative treatment to CD. Conventional plant breeding methods have not been sufficient to produce celiac-safe wheat. RNA interference technology, to some extent, has succeeded in the development of safer wheat varieties. However, these varieties have multiple challenges in terms of their implementation. Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats-associated nuclease 9 (CRISPR/Cas9) is a versatile gene-editing tool that has the ability to edit immunogenic gluten genes. So far, only a few studies have applied CRISPR/Cas9 to modify the wheat genome. In this article, we reviewed the published literature that applied CRISPR/Cas9 in wheat genome editing to investigate the current status of the CRISPR/Cas9 system to produce a low-immunogenic wheat variety. We found that in recent years, the CRISPR/Cas9 system has been continuously improved to edit the complex hexaploid wheat genome. Although some reduced immunogenic wheat varieties have been reported, CRISPR/Cas9 has still not been fully explored in terms of editing the wheat genome. We conclude that further studies are required to apply the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing system efficiently for the development of a celiac-safe wheat variety and to establish it as a “tool to celiac safe wheat”.