Biologia plantarum 69:38-48, 2025 | DOI: 10.32615/bp.2025.005
GoldenBraid-compatible infectious clone of apple latent spherical virus (ALSV) and its use for virus-induced gene silencing
- 1 Laboratory of Virology-Centre for Plant Virus Research, Institute of Experimental Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Rozvojová 263, 165 02 Prague, Czech Republic
- 2 Plant Virus and Vector Interactions-Centre for Plant Virus Research, Czech Agrifood Research Center, Drnovská 507, 161 06 Prague, Czech Republic
Virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) is a technological process in which the expression of a plant target gene is down-regulated by inoculating a plant with a recombinant virus-based vector carrying part of the coding sequence of the target gene (Baulcombe, 1999a; Burch-Smith et al., 2004). VIGS uses an RNA silencing-based defence mechanism in which double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs) of viral origin, as templates, are processed into small interfering RNAs by Dicer-like enzymes. The resulting siRNA is incorporated into an RNA-induced silencing complex, which leads to the degradation of the RNA (viral RNA, mRNA) with sequences complementary to the siRNA. Thus, VIGS utilises foreign plant genes/targets harboured by a viral vector to produce dsRNA, a source of siRNAs that triggers RNA-mediated silencing of the corresponding target gene. VIGS has proven to be a powerful and cost-effective method for functional genomics studies in plants (Rössner et al., 2022).
Keywords: agroinfiltration, apple latent spherical virus, GoldenBraid system, phytoene desaturase gene, RT-qPCR, virus-induced gene silencing.

Received: April 11, 2025; Revised: May 16, 2025; Accepted: June 3, 2025; Published online: July 3, 2025 Show citation
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