Chapter 8 - RNAi Technology: The Role in Development of Abiotic Stress-Tolerant Crops

Abstract

Over the past two decades, genetic engineering and related techniques have demonstrated striking progress in manipulation of the genes for induction of the desired characteristics into transgenic organisms. The regulatory mechanism of RNA interference (RNAi) has been studied in many higher organisms. The accuracy and precision of this phenomenon assures a great success rate in plant improvement. The RNAi provides us with an explicit methodology for down-regulation of genes of interest without hampering the expression of any other gene in the plant. The examination of different RNAi pathways, along with their components, including microRNAs and small interfering RNAs, have provided us with more than one way to achieve gene manipulation for mediated crop improvement. The phenomenon of RNAi has been studied in different abiotic environments; such as salinity, drought, extreme temperatures, heavy metals, and nutrition deprivation and radiation in various crops. RNAi-mediated crop manipulations have been reported that incorporate the utilization of vital stress-responsive elements with their subsequent mRNA and/or protein targets. Hence, collectively, RNAi technology has proven to be a promising tool for abiotic stress improvement in crops. This chapter focuses on the potential and successful application of RNAi technology for crop improvement in response to various abiotic stress factors.