One of the most efficient mechanisms by which plants protect themselves from invading virusesis the specific RNA-dependent silencing pathway termed post-transcriptional gene silencing(PTGS). In this mechanism, resistance to a virus is engineered through the expression of asegment of the virus genomein transgenic plants. Potato VirusY (PVY) is one of the mostdamaging viruses of potato, infecting...

In plants, small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) with sequence homology to transcribed regions of genes can guide the sequence-specific degradation of corresponding mRNAs, leading to posttranscriptional gene silencing (PTGS). The current consensus is that siRNA-mediated PTGS occurs primarily in the cytoplasm where target mRNAs are localized and translated into proteins. However, expression of an inve...

Somatic cells are equipped with different silencing mechanisms that protect the genome against retrotransposons. In Drosophila melanogaster, a silencing pathway implicating the argonaute protein PIWI represses retrotransposons in cells surrounding the oocyte, whereas a PIWI-independent pathway is involved in other somatic tissues. Here, we show that these two silencing mechanisms result in dist...

Posttranscriptional gene silencing (PTGS) induced by double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) is an intriguing phenomenon that has been observed in a variety of organisms, including Drosophila melanogaster. Although PTGS in Drosophila is typically observed following direct injection of the dsRNA into embryos, it is theoretically possible that the in vivo transcription of an inverted repeat transgene might a...

In plants, most microRNAs (miRNAs) and several endogenous small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) bind to ARGONAUTE1 (AGO1) to regulate the expression of endogenous genes through post-transcriptional gene silencing (PTGS). AGO1 also participates in a siRNA-mediated PTGS defense response that thwarts exogenous RNA deriving from viruses and transgenes. Here, we reveal that plants supporting transgene PTG...

Agrobacterium tumefaciens oncogenes cause transformed plant cells to overproduce auxin and cytokinin. Two oncogenes encode enzymes that convert tryptophan to indole-3-acetic acid (auxin): iaaM (tryptophan mono-oxygenase) and iaaH (indole-3-acetamide hydrolase). A third oncogene (ipt) encodes AMP isopentenyl transferase, which produces cytokinin (isopentenyl-AMP). Inactivation of ipt and iaaM (o...

In plants, double-stranded (ds) RNA that is degraded to small (sm) RNAs that are approximately 23 nucleotides in length can trigger the degradation of homologous RNAs in the cytoplasm (posttranscriptional gene silencing or PTGS) and de novo methylation of homologous DNA in the nucleus [1]. PTGS is similar to quelling in fungi [2] and RNAi in animals [3]. RNA-directed DNA methylation (RdDM) can ...

ARGONAUTE 1 (AGO1) slices endogenous messenger RNAs (mRNAs) during both microRNA (miRNA)- and short interfering RNA (siRNA)-guided post-transcriptional silencing. We have previously reported that AGO1 homeostasis is maintained through the repressive action of miR168 on AGO1 mRNA and the stabilizing effect of AGO1 protein on miR168, but siRNA-mediated AGO1 regulation has not been reported. Here,...

Both transcriptional (TGS) and posttranscriptional gene silencing (PTGS) are conserved eukaryotic gene regulatory mechanisms, integral for taming exogenous (viruses and bacteria) or endogenous (repetitive elements and transposons) invasive nucleic acids to minimize their impact on genome integrity and function. TGS and PTGS also are essential for controlling the expression of protein coding gen...