Principles and applications of dsRNA- mediated gene silencing in plants

RNA interference(RNAi) is a homology-dependent gene silencing technology.The double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) can target the coding or promoter region of a gene directly.Using hairpin structures (hpRNA), double-stranded RNA can be expressed in plants relatively easily,enabling this technology to be applied to a wide range of species to silence the gene expression.In this review,we will discuss the principles,approaches and applications of the dsRNA-mediated gene silencing technique for plant gene functional analysis.