Watanabe Yuichiro
Department of Life Sciences, University of Tokyo, Tokyo 153-8902, Japan.
Methods Mol Biol. 2011;744:1-11. doi: 10.1007/978-1-61779-123-9_1.
In the last decade, much progress has been made towards a basic understanding of RNA silencing mechanisms in plants, like in animals and other eukaryotes. Many events that were already known, such as pathogen-derived resistance, posttranscriptional gene silencing, and microRNA (miRNA)-mediated regulation, were found to share a fundamentally similar mechanism. By taking advantage of such mechanisms, whether deliberately or not, we can suppress some biological activities by targeting a specific gene function. This type of applied approach is known as RNA interference (RNAi). For many years, scientists have been trying to modify inherent activities of plants to improve their yield and quality. Suppression of some biological activities by RNAi would help to achieve such goals.
在过去十年中，在对植物RNA沉默机制的基本理解方面取得了很大进展，动物和其他真核生物也是如此。许多已知的现象，如病原体诱导的抗性、转录后基因沉默和微小RNA（miRNA）介导的调控，都被发现具有基本相似的机制。无论有意与否，通过利用这些机制，我们可以通过靶向特定基因功能来抑制某些生物活性。这种应用方法被称为RNA干扰（RNAi）。多年来，科学家们一直在尝试改变植物的固有活性以提高其产量和品质。通过RNAi抑制某些生物活性将有助于实现这些目标。
