<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p>A major challenge in the post-genome era of plant biology is to determine the
functions of all the genes in the plant genome. A straightforward approach to this
problem is to reduce or knock out expression of a gene with the hope of seeing a
phenotype that is suggestive of its function. Insertional mutagenesis is a useful tool
for this type of study, but it is limited by gene redundancy, lethal knock-outs, nontagged
mutants and the inability to target the inserted element to a specific gene. RNA
interference (RNAi) of plant genes, using constructs encoding self-complementary
‘hairpin’ RNA, largely overcomes these problems. RNAi has been used very effectively
in <italic>Caenorhabditis elegans</italic> functional genomics, and resources are currently being
developed for the application of RNAi to high-throughput plant functional genomics.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2004 Apr; 5(3):240-244