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PRINT ISSN : 2319-7692
Online ISSN : 2319-7706 Issues : 12 per year Publisher : Excellent Publishers Email : editorijcmas@gmail.com / submit@ijcmas.com Editor-in-chief: Dr.M.Prakash Index Copernicus ICV 2018: 95.39 NAAS RATING 2020: 5.38 |
How dreadful a virus may be - this has been well understood across the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Viruses pose a serious threat not only to mankind but also to agriculture by infecting several economically important crops such as rice, wheat, corn, cotton, and vegetables. Conventional methods will not be able to control these quickly evolving and emerging plant viruses. Present-day genome-editing techniques have emerged as promising tools to introduce desirable traits in target crop plant. The two major antiviral strategies, RNA silencing and genome editing have been vividly discussed in this review article. RNA silencing strategy has been utilized in antiviral breeding for more than three decades. Many crops engineered to stably express small RNAs targeting various viruses have been approved for commercial release. Among these technologies, the CRISPR/Cas9 system has gained more popularity by virtue of its simplicity, efficiency and reproducibility. CRISPR/Cas9 have been exploited to engineer plant virus resistance, either by directly targeting and cleaving the viral genome, or by modifying the host plant genome to introduce viral immunity. Here, we describe the biology of the CRISPR/Cas9 system and plant viruses, and how this genome engineering tool has been used to target the devastating plant viruses.