Diário de Biologia Vetorial

Exploring miRNAs for Developing Disease Resistant Crop

Kavit S Mehta

Climate change and environmental pressures have a significant impact on global crop production and require growing crops that can withstand many climate changes and environmental disruptions, such as irregular water supply leading to drought or waterlogging, excessive salinization of the soil, extreme and variable temperatures, ultraviolet radiation and much biotic stress. Plant have complex molecular mechanisms to cope with these dynamic environmental change; one of the most common and useful mechanism is reprogramming expressions stress-responsive genes. Plant miRNAs (miRNAs) have become vital post-transcriptional and translational gene expression regulators to modulate stress effects. Recent research set their critical roles in epigenetic regulation of stress / adaptive reactions, as well as in ensuring the stability of the plant genome. Some stress-sensitive miRNAs identified from various crops and miRNA-based RNA interference (RNAi) turns into a technology of choice for improving crop traits and providing a phenotypic and genotypic solution. Here present a promising review of the study of miRNAs as potent targets for crops that can withstand multi-stress environments using function loss/enhancement approaches.