Journal of Genomes and Exomes

RNA interference (RNAi) is a mechanism of small RNA-guided regulation of gene expression in which small RNAs inhibit the expression of genes with complementary nucleotide sequences. RNAi has emerged as a powerful modality for battling challenging viruses and provides a natural defense against viral pathogens. In plants, RNAi has been successfully used to express cognate dsRNAs for viral transcripts in order to initiate the process of viral gene silencing. Despite the wide applicability of RNAi for achieving viral resistance, there are some challenges and constraints that must to be addressed to develop RNAi as a more effective tool for virus resistance. The present review provides an update on different approaches of using RNAi for virus resistance development in various crop plants. The factors influencing RNAi-mediated virus resistance and the major constraints are also discussed in detail.