Transient expression of siRNA targeted against the TYLCV AV1, AC1 and AC3 genes for high resistance in tomato

•Silencing three genes in tomato using a transient system.•Three genes were targeted simultaneously in tomato.•A new approach for high resistance against virus in plants.

Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV) is a globally devastating disease that affects the production of many crops, particularly tomato, leading to considerable economic losses. RNA interference, which allows sequence-specific gene silencing at the post-transcriptional level, is an effective method to obtain virus-resistant lines of crops. Agrobacterium-mediated transient expression assay has emerged as a rapid and useful approach to evaluate gene functions in plants without the need to produce transgenic lines. In this study, we transformed the plant expression vector pBIN438-AV1–AC1–AC3(i/r), which consists of the inverted repeat of ΔAV1, ΔAC1, and ΔAC3 fusion fragments into Agrobacterium tumefaciens EHA105 to generate tomato lines with high viral resistance. The viral resistance of the fusion gene was evaluated by transient expression. The test plants did not show disease symptoms at 35 d postinoculation with TYLCV. This study provided an important method for plant antiviral breeding and safe tomato production.