Abstract
Various plant diseases pose a huge threat to crop production globally by affecting the crop yield, both quality as well as quantity. Plant viral diseases are most devastating, mainly caused by virus particles such as tobacco mosaic virus, cucumber mosaic virus, etc. RNA interference (RNAi) technology has emerged to be a promising therapeutic weapon to mitigate the inherent risks, such as the use of a specific transgene, marker gene, or gene control sequence associated with development of traditional transgenics. Small non-coding RNAs constitute an important class of gene expression regulators that control different biological processes, thus resulting in creating defense mechanisms against various viral pathogens. In plants, several small RNA (sRNA) silencing pathways have evolved to produce a wide range of sRNAs with specialized functions. Thus, in this chapter, we discuss the roles of miRNA and siRNA in plant defense against viruses.
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