RNA interference: evolutions and applications in plant disease management

Abstract

Plant diseases are significant threats to modern agriculture and their control remains a challenge to the management of cultivation. Therefore, plant disease management has always been one of the main objectives of any crop improvement programme. To reduce the losses caused by plant diseases, plant biologists have adopted numerous methods to engineer resistant plants. Among them, RNA silencing-based resistance has been a powerful tool that has been used to engineer resistant crops during the last two decades. Engineered plants in particular plants expressing RNA-silencing nucleotides are becoming increasingly important and are likely to provide more effective strategies in future. The advantage of RNAi as a novel gene therapy against fungal, viral and bacterial infection in plants lies in the fact that it regulates gene expression via mRNA degradation, translation repression and chromatin remodelling through small non-coding RNAs. Mechanistically, the silencing processes are guided by processing products of the dsRNA trigger, which are known as small interfering RNAs and microRNAs. The application of tissue-specific or inducible gene silencing, with the use of appropriate promoters to silence several genes simultaneously should enhance researchers’ ability to protect crops against diseases. This reviews a general discussion on the development of RNAi and role of RNAi in plant disease management.