Credit: MLU/Markus Scholz

There is nothing worse to a farmer than when an entire population of plants are overcome by a virus.

An infection can destroy an entire crop, posing potential harm to human beings in the process. However, researchers may have been able to come up with a vaccine that can protect crops from viral pathogens.

Any kind of plant virus is problematic to global food security. With pathogens constantly changing, these vaccines can help farmers stay ahead of the curb. When a virus infects a plant, replication occurs very quickly. The plant cell often releases RNA, via either a messenger or a double-stranded RNA, which makes its way through the cell helping the virus replicate.

Plants are equipped with defense proteins that recognize this negative RNA and are aided by enzymes that slice them apart. The remaining bits and pieces of the RNA can team up with a group of proteins that will attempt to destroy the virus. This tactic does not always work, though, because very few siRNAs made by a plant have the correct chemical properties to fight against the viral RNA.

To compensate for this, researchers have developed molecular tests to identify what siRNAs are efficient enough to fight viruses. They were able to take good plants and use them as a vaccine against other virus-infected plants. When sprayed on the leaves, the best siRNA protected 90% of the plants.

Moving forward with this exciting news, researchers are now trying to find the most efficient and cost-effective ways to administer the vaccine to the plants. They hope to develop a spray that uses nanoparticles to deliver these healthy fighters. They also want to make sure they can target the most economically dangerous viruses.