Gene Silencing Technologies in Creating Resistance to Plant Diseases

Plant diseases represent one of the most destructive and major problems of agricultural production. In order to sustain high quality yielding and disease resistant plants, there is need to incorporate some biotechnological practices like gene silencing technologies to the breeding program. Gene silencing is a technique used to suppress the expression of a gene and is controlled by a variety of mechanisms. Transcriptional, post-transcriptional, virus-induced (VIGS) and MicroRNA gene silencing are the different pathways. The applications of gene silencing technologies in creating artificial resistance to plants have been shown for crown gall disease, viral infections, plant nematodes, disease-resistant root stocks and others. Furthermore, the advantages of gene silencing technologies cannot be over emphasized in its use for loss of function and functional genomics analysis has been reliable, fast, easy, ensures rapid selection and can be used for a wide host range, though, the issue of suppression of non-targeted genes especially for members of a gene family, is one of the major limitations of VIGS. Finally, gene silencing technology has proven to be an effective tool for next generation of plant genomics.