Cross Protection Against Virus Diseases in Fruit Trees

Abstract

Fruit trees are commonly infected with plant viruses. Several methods have been used to eradicate viruses from plant tissues including chemotherapy, thermotherapy, in vitropropagation, and a combination of some or these protocols. Recent advances in molecular techniques have provided a new approach for developing virus resistant genotypes. Genetic engineering of virus resistance into plants has been accomplished using several strategies including satellite-RNA-mediated resistance, antisense RNA-mediated resistance, and coat protein-mediated resistance, among others. Current advances in using coat protein-mediated resistance have proven promising in protecting several agronomic crops against virus infection. More recently, a number of fruit crop species have been transformed with coat protein genes of important plant viruses and promising results have been obtained. This is a general review of cross protection strategies used in combatting virus diseases and the current advances made in genetic engineering of virus resistance in fruit trees.