Advances on Virus-induced Gene Silencing for Gene Function Characterization in Plants

Virus-induced gene silencing(VIGS) is a recently developed technique of gene transcript suppression for characterizing gene functions of plants in reverse genetics,which involves a virus delivery vector carrying a short sequence of targeted gene to infect a young plant,and in a few weeks natural defense mechanisms of the plant result in silencing of the targeted gene.It is a kind of post-transcriptional gene silencing.The reviews introduced the follows: ①a positive molecular mechanism involved in VIGS,including the silencing initiation,maintenance,and signal amplification and dissemination;②developments of VIGS technique including VIGS vectors and methodology;③advantages of VIGS over other approaches,such as T-DNA or transposon tagging,including the circumvention of plant transformation,methodological simplicity and speedy results.④studying the roles of genes involved in plant defense responses,metabolic and development.The review provides the prospects for VIGS as a powerful and high-through tool for assessing and characterizing the function in plant function genomics.