Crops make great contributions by providing human beings with food, feed, fiber, and other consumable resources, as well as improving the ecological environment. In order to overcome environmental problems, such as climate change, reduced cultivated land, and shortage of available water resources, and in order to feed the growing global population and improve the living environment of human beings, new breeding technologies are urgently needed. These will improve plants, thus increasing plant productivity and quality, and ensuring sustainable development of the planting industry.

Plant precision breeding focuses on potential genes that could improve crop yield and quality, and enhance resistance to harsh environments, and then manipulates these genes in crops to obtain new plant varieties. During this process, various biotechnologies are being used to study the function of these potential genes.

Unlike in model plants, such as Arabidopsis thaliana, these technologies are extremely difficult to apply to crops, due to crops usually containing complex genomes, long growth periods, serious lignifications, high content of polysaccharides and polyphenols, and so on. Therefore, the technologies used in model species should be modified for different crops. Here, we collect some optimized methods that can be used in crops and could contribute to plant precision breeding.