Wheat transformation was first initiated in 1992, and several studies were conducted to increase its efficiency; however, a very low probability of less than 0.3% was achieved. In 2011, the EU Commission announced a new plant breeding technology that modifies the DNA of seeds and plant cells to develop new varieties with desired characteristics. With the commercialization of the CRISPR/Cas9 technology, a site-directed nuclease technology, the possibility of its application in agriculture has increased with the rapid development of the technology. Recently, genome editing studies have been conducted in wheat, and they have been used for the functional analysis of genes related to various agricultural traits. The wheat full-length genome information was released in the form of a draft sequence in 2018, belatedly in comparison to other crops owing to allohexaploidy and a large genome (17 Gb) size. The recent pre-harvest sprouting resistance wheat breeding material developed in Japan suggests that it is possible to rapidly develop breeding materials through precision breeding technology. Finally, it is necessary to systematically achieve the goal of optimizing agricultural traits of crops through precise breeding technology to increase the breeding accuracy of allohexaploid wheat and rapid genetic fixation using the reduction in generation technology.

In recent years, new plant breeding technologies (NPBT) have had enormous effects on breeding and the agricultural industry. In particular, genome editing technology, including site-directed nuclease technologies, has progressed dramatically since the first-generation Zinc finger nucleases to the third-generation clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated protein 9 (CRISPR/Cas9). CRISPR/Cas9 technology has yielded a revolutionary breakthrough in the accurate, efficient, and user-friendly genome editing of eukaryotes. Several methods for basic research and applications, such as knock-out, base editing, gene targeting, and transcriptional activation or repression have been derived from CRISPR/Cas9 technology. Herein, we will describe the current progress in NPBTs and also summarize the crops developed by NPBTs. After analyzing the current status of NPBTs and crop development, we have proposed potential strategies for crop development using NPBTs.