CRISPR genome editing in food and feed crops: intellectual property challenges, global accessibility, and the Indian perspective.

Abstract

The ever-increasing global demand for food and feed, coupled with population growth and climate change, necessitates the development of high-yielding and stress-resilient crops. CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology has emerged as a transformative genome-editing tool due to its efficiency, precision, and ability to generate targeted genetic modifications. This review highlights recent advances in CRISPR genome editing, including base editing, prime editing, and novel Cas variants, together with emerging approaches such as epigenome editing, mitochondrial genome editing, and hypercompact Cas systems, and their applications in improving crop productivity, stress tolerance, and nutritional quality. In food and feed crops, these applications also include crop-specific priorities such as grain and nutritional quality in food crops and digestibility, forage quality, and mineral bioavailability in feed and forage crops. Particular emphasis is placed on the complex intellectual property (IP) landscape surrounding CRISPR technologies, including patents on editing systems, delivery platforms, and proprietary vectors. These intellectual property barriers can restrict research access, technology transfer, and commercialization, particularly in developing countries. The review further discusses patent limitations, licensing frameworks, and strategies to enhance equitable global access through collaborative approaches such as non-exclusive licensing, humanitarian licensing, indigenous technology development, and international partnerships. Overall, the review underscores the need to balance innovation, intellectual property protection, and global accessibility to ensure that CRISPR-based technologies contribute effectively to worldwide food and feed security and sustainable agriculture.