A REVIEW ARTICLE: APPLICATIONS OF GENETIC ENGINEERING, RECOMBINANT DNA TECHNOLOGY, AND GENETIC IMPROVEMENT OF MEDICINAL & AROMATIC PLANTS FOR FUTURE PROSPECTS

Abstract

Medicinal and aromatic plants play a crucial role in benefiting humans and other animals directly and indirectly by providing the raw materials for pharmaceutical industries and curing severe diseases. These plants provide natural medicines and have great importance in sustaining the economy of several countries of the world. Herbal therapy has been essential in understanding and treating a wide range of human and animal illnesses throughout history. The chemical compounds found in medicinal plants have the ability to treat a wide range of illnesses. It is increasingly essential to improve the genetic composition of these plant species for both therapeutic and commercial reasons. With the creation of around 5500 plant species, mutation breeding is an important tactic. Chromosome doubling, or polyploidy induction, can produce larger, more valuable plant parts with both medical and commercial use. Plant tissue culture (PTC) is an essential breeding method that produces pharmaceutical secondary metabolites by manipulating the genomes of medicinal plants through Agrobacterium-mediated gene transformation and artificial polyploidy. Defects in first- and second-generation gene editing technologies, which depended on synthetic endonucleases like zinc finger endonuclease (ZFN) and transcription activator-like receptor nuclease (TALEN), have been corrected thanks to the development of the third generation clustered regularly interspaced short repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9 gene editing system. These gene editing techniques make it easier to modify medicinal plants' secondary metabolite pathways. For medicinal and aromatic plant species that might find it difficult to undergo stable genetic change, virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS), which is based on short interfering RNA-mediated RNA silencing, offers a quick substitute for eliminating gene expression.