Virus Resistance

Viral infection is a serious, ongoing threat across many crop species, capable of causing severe yield loss and, in bad cases, outright plant death. Biotechnology addresses this the same general way it addresses herbicide and insect pressure - by deliberately introducing a resistance gene into the host plant, in this case specifically genes that produce enzymes capable of actively deactivating or degrading viral DNA once infection is attempted. A plant engineered this way is not simply tolerating infection at a lower cost, the way some conventionally bred resistant varieties do; it is actively equipped to disable the invading virus's own genetic …