Biotic Stress-Tolerant Plants Through Small Rna Technology

Abstract

With an increasing population around the world, the rapid loss of agricultural fields shows us the urgent importance of finding solutions to develop agricultural productivity. Besides industrialization, several effectors such as abiotic and biotic factors cause losses in crop productivity. Biotic factors threaten production and transportation of products worldwide. Bacteria, fungi, viruses, and oomycetes cause losses both pre- and postharvest. It is crucial to improve biotic stress-tolerant plants to overcome reduction in plant productivity. For many years, researchers focused on understanding plant defense mechanisms. Anatomical, physiological, and molecular adaptive mechanisms were investigated for several plant species. Besides the innate immunity mechanisms, including cross-talk, among the phytohormones to manage appropriate defense mechanisms against pathogens, new generation strategies in crop improvements are widely used in plant biotechnology. Although conventional breeding has importance in breeding new varieties, new technologies increase the possibility of success. Recently, new combinations of technologies have been proven effective to develop new cultivars. Small RNA technology is one of the developing crop improvement technologies relying on regulating specific genes together with their sequence identity. In this chapter, we focus on the small RNA technologies used in improvement of biotic stress-tolerant plants.