Gene Silencing Provides Efficient Protection Against Plant Viruses

Abstract In the early 1980s, the ability to transform and regenerate plants opened the way for developing biotechnological strategies to control virus infections. This chapter focuses on how knowledge of RNA silencing has been applied successfully to confer virus resistance in principal crops, i.e. sugarcane, maize, rice, potato, wheat, soyabean, cassava, sugarbeet, tomato and barley. It also illustrates how ongoing research in this field has allowed the development of new tools that, having been proved to be efficient in model systems, will be shortly applied to agriculture. However, extensive field trials are required to validate the effectiveness of these new tools in conferring stable and durable virus resistance. From the point of view of biosafety, transgenic plants expressing short sequences of foreign RNAs are undoubtedly safer and more acceptable than those expressing foreign proteins.