Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
been developed and applied to the functional analysis of plant genes. Some web
sites and URL for gene silencing are detailed in Table
2.11
.
RNAi
RNA interference (RNAi) is a method for RNA-mediated gene silencing by se-
quence-specific degradation of homologous mRNA, triggered by double-stranded
RNA (dsRNA); also known as post-transcriptional gene silencing (PTGS) (Water-
house et al.
1998
; Chuang and Meyerowitz
2000
).
ihp RNA
Constitutive expression of an intron-containing self-complementary hairpin RNA
(ihpRNA) has been another method for silencing target genes in plants. With de-
mands for conditional silencing of target genes (the most useful silencing in genet-
ics is that which results in prevention of plant regeneration or embryonic lethality),
RNAi systems using chemical-inducible Cre/LoxP recombination or a promoter of
heat shock inducible genes have been developed (Guo et al.
2003
; Masclaux et al.
2004
).
CATMA
In
Arabidopsis
, the Complete
Arabidopsis
Transcriptome MicroArray (CATMA)
project has been initiated to design and produce high-quality gene-specific and gene
silencing sequence tags (GSTs) covering most of the
Arabidopsis
genome.
AGRIKOLA
Using the GST data set of the CATMA project, the
Arabidopsis
Genomic RNAi
Knock-out Line Analysis (in AGRIKOLA) project has also been started, with the
goal of systematically analysing
Arabidopsis
genes by RNAi interference (Hilson
et al.
2003
). The
Medicago trunculata
RNAi database is also available on this web
site as an information resource for RNAi-based gene silencing.
VIGS
Virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) is a derivative method of the ones above that
takes advantage of the plant RNAi-mediated antiviral defence mechanism, via RNA
interference. The VIGS system was used to assess the function of almost 5000 ran-
dom
Nicotiana benthamiana
cDNAs in disease resistance (Lu et al.
2003a
,
b
).
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