Double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs) targeted against essential genes can trigger a lethal RNA interference (RNAi) response in insect pests. The application of this concept in plant protection is hampered by the presence of an endogenous plant RNAi pathway that processes dsRNAs into short interfering RNAs. We found that long dsRNAs can be stably produced in chloroplasts, a cellular compartment that ap...

In recent years, the research on the potential of using RNA interference (RNAi) to suppress crop pests has made an outstanding growth. However, given the variability of RNAi efficiency that is observed in many insects, the development of novel approaches toward insect pest management using RNAi requires first to unravel factors behind the efficiency of dsRNA-mediated gene silencing. In this rev...

The plastid genome represents an attractive target of genetic engineering in crop plants. Plastid transgenes often give high expression levels, can be stacked in operons and are largely excluded from pollen transmission. Recent research has greatly expanded our toolbox for plastid genome engineering and many new proof-of-principle applications have highlighted the enormous potential of the tran...

The family Avsunviroidae comprises four viroid species with the ability to form hammerhead ribozymes that mediate self-cleavage of the multimeric plus and minus strands resulting from replication in the chloroplast through a symmetric rolling-circle mechanism. Research on these RNAs is restricted by their host range, which is limited to the plants wherein they were initially identified and some...

As already demonstrated in greenhouse trials, outcrossing of transgenic plants can be drastically reduced via transgene integration into the plastid. We verified this result in the field with Petunia, for which the highest paternal leakage has been observed. The variety white 115 (W115) served as recipient and Pink Wave (PW) and the transplastomic variant PW T16, encoding the uidA reporter gene...