Spray-Induced Gene Silencing: a Powerful Innovative Strategy for Crop Protection. Plant pathogens cause serious crop losses worldwide. Recent new studies demonstrate that spraying double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs) and small RNAs (sRNAs) that target essential pathogen genes on plant surfaces confer efficient crop protection. 

Gene silencing may be a general term describing epigenetic processes of gene regulation. This process is important for the differentiation of many different types of cells. Genes are regulated at either the transcriptional or post-transcriptional level. Transcriptional gene silencing is that the results of histone modifications, creating an environment of heterochromatin around a gene that creates it inaccessible to transcriptional machinery (RNA polymerase, transcription factors, etc.).