Comprehensive Advancement in Plant Virus Resistance Due to Genetic Engineering

For the past years, there has been a revolutionary development in the production of crops resistant to different plant viruses because of genetic engineering. This is according to a review article authored by botany and virology experts in Sri Krishnadevaraya University.

Plant viruses are considered as major threats to agricultural productivity, especially in the tropics and sub-tropics. Conventional techniques such as border crops and cross-protection only have limited control over the epidemics in the fields. Thus, experts use genetic engineering tools such as pathogen-derived resistance which entails the expression of plant viral proteins to serve as decoys to prevent virus invasion. Another strategy is to use pathogen-targeted resistance which involves the use of genome editing tools such as zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats CRISPR-Cas9 or CRISPR-Cas13 for targeting the mutation or cleavage of viral DNA and RNA genomes, thereby conferring resistance to different plant viruses.

Read the chapter in Springerlink's Genetically Modified Crops.