RNA interference as a new biotechnological tool for the control of virus diseases in plants

Stability of Transgenic Resistance Against Plant Viruses

“…These sRNAs through RNA silencing mediate repressive gene regulation and play important role in developmental control, preservation of genome integrity and plant responses to adverse environmental conditions, including biotic stress (Brodersen & Voinnet, 2006;Chapman & Carrington, 2007;Pasquinelli et al, 2005;Ruiz-Ferrer & Voinnet, 2009;Vaucheret, 2006). To date, it has primarily been the cytoplasmic siRNA silencing pathway (also referred to as post transcriptional gene silencing, PTGS) that has been exploited by genetic engineering to confer resistance to plant viruses (Mlotshwa et al, 2008;Tenllado et al, 2004).…”

“…Further exploiting this knowledge led to constructing IR transgenes from which long double-stranded (ds) RNA precursors of siRNAs were directly generated. The utilization of such IR transgene constructs has become the method of choice for providing genetically engineered resistance to viruses because a single copy is sufficient to provide immunity, there is no expression of viral proteins, short genome incomplete sequences can be used and efficiencies of up to 90% of all transgenic plants produced to be resistant to the homologous virus were achieved (Lin et al, 2007;Tenllado et al, 2004;Ritzenthaler, 2005). In contrast to the situation with RNA viruses, the use of RNA silencing against DNA viruses most often resulted in delays in symptom development and did not always prevent virus replication (Lin et al, 2007).…”

RNA Interference with Special Reference to Combating Viruses of Crustacea

“…The phenomenon of RNAi has subsequently been described in a wide range of eukaryotic organisms including arthropods and mammals [40,45,48,77,100,121,147]. To date, RNAi has been used as a strategy to investigate gene function [5,15,213] (for example, it has been used to analysis the function of close to 17,000 of the 19,000 (approximate figure) genes in Caenorhabditis elegans [76,186]) and as an antiviral mechanism to combat viral infections in plants [182,211], invertebrates [29,185,209] and vertebrates (in particular, influenza, cancer and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) [53,54,122,170,195].…”

Transient Expression of Homologous Hairpin RNA Interferes with Broad bean wilt virus 2 Infection in Nicotiana benthamiana

“…Numerous studies have indicated that IR constructs of transgenes can effectively induce RNA silencing to trigger knockout of specific gene expressions (Ali et al, 2010;Allen et al, 2004;Gavilano et al, 2006;Johansen and Carrington, 2001;Kusaba et al, 2003;Liu et al, 2002;Meli et al, 2010;Pandolfini et al, 2003;Segal et al, 2003;Smith et al, 2000;Xiong et al, 2005). In addition, a number of studies showed that IR constructs of transgenes containing virus-derived sequences transformed to plants can effectively protect plants from challenging viruses (Abhary et al 2006;Bucher et al 2006;Chen et al, 2004;Di Nicola-Negri et al 2005;Hammond et al 2006;Lennefors et al 2006;Pooggin et al 2003;Simón-Mateo and García, 2011;Tenllado et al 2003;Tenllado et al, 2004;Vanitharani et al, 2003;Wang et al, 2000). In particular, transient expression of a hpRNA homologous to sequences of Pepper mild mottle virus (PMMoV) caused inhibition of PMMoV accumulation (Tenllado et al, 2003).…”

“…RNA 1 encodes proteins involved in genome replication and expression, and RNA2 encodes the movement protein and the two CPs (Lisa and Boccardo, 1996). RNA silencing has been efficiently used to generate resistance against plant viruses in many ornamental plants (Bucher et al, 2006;Hammond et al, 2006;Tenllado et al, 2004) and in different host systems to obtain resistance against several other viruses (Abhary et al, 2006;Di Nicola-Negri et al, 2005;Lennefors et al, 2006;Pooggin et al, 2003;Tenllado et al, 2003;Vanitharani et al, 2003). Particularly, transgenic expression of pathogen-derived sequences encoding hpRNAs that undergo to an efficient RNA silencing is a new and agricultural sustainable strategy to obtain virus-resistant plants (Smith et al, 2000).…”