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Genome editing: New antiviral weapon for plants

Nature Plants volume 1, Article number: 15146 (2015) Cite this article

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CRISPR–Cas technology has been extensively applied to editing endogenous genes in plants for gene functional studies. New application of this technology to combating viral infection by destroying invading virus DNA has now become possible in plants.

Plant viruses cause enormous losses in worldwide crop production every year. Two Brief Communications1,2 published in this issue of Nature Plants demonstrate that the CRISPR–Cas (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats–CRISPR-associated) technology for genome editing can now be employed to destruct trespassing viral genomic DNA in plants, thus conferring invaluable virus resistance to the hosts.

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Figure 1: Schematic of CRISPR–Cas-based geminivirus destruction in a plant cell.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dandan Zhang, Zhenxiang Li and Jian-Feng Li are at the State Key Laboratory of Biocontrol and Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Plant Resources, School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China.,

    Dandan Zhang, Zhenxiang Li & Jian-Feng Li

Authors
  1. Dandan Zhang
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  2. Zhenxiang Li
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  3. Jian-Feng Li
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Correspondence to Jian-Feng Li.

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Zhang, D., Li, Z. & Li, JF. Genome editing: New antiviral weapon for plants. Nature Plants 1, 15146 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2015.146

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2015.146

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