Study of plant exclusive virus-derived small interfering RNAs

Abstract

Plants, being sessile, are vividly change with respect to gene expression profiling during stress conditions. Regulation of gene expression is controlled by many of the factors, in which ribonucleic acids interference (RNAi) mechanism has been proved to be an important regulator of both transcriptional and post-transcription controls of gene expression. RNAi mechanism provides the anti-viral resistance to plants, in which virus-derived small interfering RNAs (vsiRNAs) is a well-known component. Apart from some databases like siRNAdb, HIVsirDB and VIRsiRNAdb, which are available online pertaining to siRNAs as well as vsiRNAs generated during viral infection in humans, ‘PVsiRNAdb (http://www.nipgr.res.in/PVsiRNAdb)’, a manually curated plant-exclusive database having information related to vsiRNAs found in different virus-infected plants, collected by exhaustive data mining of published literature so far. This chapter describes the data retrieval and functioning of PVsiRNAdb. Major emphasis is also given to the tools available at this database and explanation of all the results output. The information in this plant exclusive database is very useful for the researcher to explore the complex plants and virus interaction and furthermore in the agriculture field, virus-resistant varieties of crops can be raised.