Plant Micro RNAs - Sustainable Alternatives for Crop Protection

The growth and productivity of crops is highly dependent on several environmental stresses such as soil pH and texture, climate change leading to high rainfall or drought, temperature extremities, insects, several pests and pathogens.

- Era Vaidya Malhotra, Rishu Jain, Sangita Bansal

Over the years, plants have evolved and developed several defence mechanisms to tolerate and protect themselves from such adverse conditions. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are one such tool available within plants that they employ to recover from various stress responses. MicroRNAs, as the name indicates, are small 20-24nt long non-coding ribonucleic acid molecules. They protect the plants against the pathogens by a process involving post-transcriptional gene silencing, popularly known as RNA interference (RNAi) or Co-suppression. RNAi is a eukaryotic process that exploits the double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) to silence or switch off the expression of any undesirable gene (Figure 1).