Adaptation of crops to climate change: possible contribution of genome editing

Climate change means warmer conditions, with more frequent risks of drought, but also a wide variation in conditions, with extreme events, from one year to the next. To adapt crops to this change, we need varieties that combine several types of tolerance, particularly to high temperatures and water stress at different stages of the plant life, as well as resistance to different types of bio-aggressors associated to this change. Using various examples, we show that genome-editing techniques can be a tool to assist conventional plant breeding in obtaining such varieties more quickly. In the discussion, we compare the selection of varieties adapted to different conditions (called multi-adapted varieties), thanks to genome editing, with the mixture of varieties with adaptations to different climatic conditions, and we conclude that the two approaches can be complementary.