Abstract

Greengram (Vigna radiata L.) is an important leguminous pulse crop in India. Yellow Mosaic Disease (YMD) has been one of the major threats to enhance its productivity. YMD is caused by Mungbean Yellow Mosaic Virus (MYMV), transmitted by whiteflies. There are several post transcriptional gene silencing approaches including anti-sense RNA, siRNA etc.  been tried  successfully to control Geminiviral diseases in several crops. However, certain limitations such as incomplete resistance and extensive off target gene silencing have hindered practical applications of these approaches. Genome engineering strategy has emerged as effective tool to improve viral resistance/immunity in plants. CRISPR/Cas9 (Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR  associated  9)  mediated  viral  interference  is  now evolving as an alternative promising tool for understanding the host-virus interactions and thereby helping attenuation of viral diseases in plants. The 20bp sgRNA(s) with PAM (proto spacer associated motif) can direct Cas9 endonuclease to induce precise disruption at targeted site(s) of viral gene(s). With considering the importance of viral resistance in green gram, aim to use CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing platform to target site specific cleavage of coding and non coding  regions  of  Geminiviral  genomes  of  MYMV  and  MYMIV for attenuation  of  disease and  subsequently increase the crop yield in greengram.