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Copyright © 2008 Vargas et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. Transient expression of homologous hairpin RNA interferes with PVY transmission by aphids Marisol Vargas,1 Belén Martínez-García,1 José Ramón Díaz-Ruíz,1 and Francisco Tenllado  11Departamento de Biología de Plantas, Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas, (CIB, CSIC) Campus de la Ciudad Universitaria, Av. Ramiro de Maeztu 9, 28040 Madrid, Spain Corresponding author.Marisol Vargas: marisolvargasco/at/yahoo.com; Belén Martínez-García: belenmaga/at/gmail.com; José Ramón Díaz-Ruíz: jrdiazruiz/at/cib.csic.es; Francisco Tenllado: tenllado/at/cib.csic.es Received January 29, 2008; Accepted March 19, 2008. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. | ||||
Abstract Hairpin RNAs have been used to confer resistance to viruses in plants through RNA silencing. However, it has not been demonstrated that RNA silencing was effective against inoculation by aphids of non-persistently transmitted viruses, the major route of plant virus spread in nature. As a proof-of-principle strategy, we made use of Agrobacterium tumefaciens to transiently express a hairpin RNA homologous to Potato virus Y (PVY) in plant tissues. A complete and specific interference with aphid transmission of PVY was achieved by inducers of RNA silencing, as demonstrated by specific siRNAs accumulation in agroinfiltrated tissues. To our knowledge, this is the first report of successful interference with non-persistent transmission of a plant virus using RNA interference. | ||||
