**6. Genome editing technology**

Genetic engineering plays a magnificent role in creation of crops with desired qualities, crop improvement and identification of gene functions. Genome editing technology has been emerged as a new and powerful approach over past few decades which involves the precise editing of gene of interest and utilizes nucleases that target the specific sequence to generate double strand break. The application certain genome editing technologies viz., sequence-specific nucleases (SSN) like ZNFs (zinc-finger nucleases), TALENs (transcription activator-like effector nucleases), CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)/Cas9 system is a promising and advance technologies that increases crop yield and also confers tolerance to various stress conditions. TALENs has been successfully employed for genetic modification in tomato [28] and potato [29, 30] crops. CRISPR/Cas9 technology has been successfully used as genome editing tool in various vegetables

and fruits. In tomato, it has been used with the purpose to increase shelf life and manipulates ripening using RIN, SLALC, lncRNA1459 genes [31–33] increased resistance to powdery mildew by involving SlMlo1 gene [34] (**Table 2**) (**Figure 9**).


#### **Table 2.**

*Genome editing techniques and their role in various plant species.*

#### **Figure 9.**

*Genome editing technology for postharvest factors (Source: Pizzaro et al., 2018.) [41].*
