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Biology and Biotechnology of Environmental Stress Tolerance in Plants, Volume 3

9.9 FUTURE PERSPECTIVE

The wide acceptance of sRNA mediated strategy and progressive develop­

ment of allied technology enable researchers to explore many underlying

mechanisms of gene expression. The construction of different kinds of

sRNAs and the up gradation of bioinformatics has allowed a new perspec­

tive of biological science. Such research enables us to develop advanced

cultivars of crops and other beneficial plants (Kamthan et al., 2015). Recent

findings showed that plant miRNA and phased siRNA are expressed

spatially and temporally and thus manipulation of these sRNA molecules

in a specific tissue and at a particular stage of development, can precisely

target the trait(s) for improvement (Zhang et al., 2019). Another study has

confirmed that sRNA mediated gene silencing efficiently initiates and drive

the repression of both class 1 transposable elements (RNA) and class 2 trans­

posable elements (RNA) (Wang et al., 2020). Application of CRISP/Cas 9

technology-based approach for cloning of miRNA genes and use of artificial

miRNA in the study of genomics provide a promising advantage in the field

of stress biology (Budak & Zhang, 2017; Zhou & Luo, 2013).

However, some drawbacks and negative feedback have emerged out due

to various apparent discrepancies where target mRNAs were abundantly

remained unaffected by miRNA overexpression, but target proteins were

remarkably down-regulated (Aukerman & Sakai, 2003; Bari et al., 2006;

Gandikota et al., 2007). Another vital issue is that sRNA-based technology still

has not achieved the goal because of lack of high-performance testing and also

due to certain features of such sRNAs like their tiny size, presence of sRNAs

within genomic samples just like background noise or junk DNA (Budak &

Zhang, 2017; Grobhans & Filipowicz, 2008; Kawaji & Hayashizaki, 2008).

In addition, cell-specific and Spatio-temporal regulation of sRNA is also an

obstacle for proper understanding of small RNA biology (Park & Shin, 2014).

Progressive studies of the drawbacks and enhanced knowledge of sRNA

functioning will be helpful to improve various structural and agronomic traits

along with resistance against salinity and similar stressors.

9.10 CONCLUSION

Plants are frequently exposed to many environmental cues like biotic and

abiotic stressors. To alleviate the negative influence of such stressors a

strict transcriptomic reprogramming is very necessary for the survival of