Antisense suppression of replicase gene expression recovers tomato plants from leaf curl virus infection

Many examples of extreme virus resistance and gene silencing of endogenous genes have been described in transgenic plants containing antisense transgenes. We show that transforming Tomato leaf curl virus-infected plants with the homologous replicase gene constructs that produce RNAs capable of duplex formation confers gene silencing and results in recovery of infected plants. We propose that the antisense suppression in the virus-infected plants provide a threshold level of dsRNA needed to induce gene silencing leading to the virus suppression.