Open Access

Wheat improvement relies on genetic diversity associated with variation in target traits. While traditionally the main sources of novel genetic diversity for breeding are wheat varieties or various wild relatives of wheat, advances in gene mapping and genome editing technologies provide an opportunity for engineering new variants of genes that could have beneficial effect on agronomic traits. Here, we provide the overview of the genome editing technologies and their application to creating targeted variation in genes that could enhance wheat productivity. We discuss the potential utility of the genome editing technologies and CRISPR-Cas-induced variation incorporated into the pre-breeding pipelines for wheat improvement.

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