Zinc Finger Nuclease (ZFNs) and Transcription Activator-like Effector Nucleases (TALENs) Based Genome Editing in Enhancement of Anticancer Activity of Plants
Pooja Saraswat, Ambika Chaturvedi, Rajiv Ranjan
Abstract
Medicinal plants are often used for different medical purposes. Many anticancer drugs are obtained from plant extracts or derived synthetically. These herb plants were initially used to treat humans because of their highly enriched metabolic compounds involved in various physiological activities. Conventional breeding techniques were applied for medicinal plants. Also, to improve the efficiency and production of such metabolites various methods like next-generation sequencing and classical biotechnology were used previously. But, due to the advance in genome editing approaches, this has become much easier. The synthetic nucleases like Zinc Finger Nucleases (ZFNs), Transcription activator-like endonuclease (TALENs), and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) are developed in the past recent years providing great opportunities for plant community. These technologies have enabled the identification of pathways involved in various metabolite formations, then later used in 282the improvement, and enhancement of plant metabolites discussed in the chapter.