title: Geminiviruses for biotechnology: the art of parasite taming.
abstract: Viruses are intracellular pathogens that have evolved efficient strategies for replication and expression of their proteins in the host cells. Geminiviruses - plant viruses with small circular single-stranded DNA genomes - effectively manipulate plant cell processes for viral functions, entailing great potential for biotechnological applications. This potentiality has been realized in the form of protein expression and gene-silencing vectors, and, more recently, vectors for genome editing - a technology that these viruses seem particularly well-suited to facilitate. This insight offers an overview of the biological properties of geminiviruses, with emphasis on those leveraging development of geminivirus-based replicons. It illustrates the basis for engineering geminivirus-based replicons and their applications. Furthermore, it discusses the reported use and future perspectives of geminivirus-based replicons for genome editing.
authors.affiliation: Shanghai Center for Plant Stress Biology (PSC), Shanghai Institutes of Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 201602, China.
authors.forename: Rosa
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lozano-Durán
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001709:Biotechnology / Q000379:methods*; D017791:Geminiviridae / Q000502:physiology*; D000072669:Gene Editing; D010271:Parasites / Q000502:physiology*; D010944:Plants / Q000235:genetics / Q000821:virology; D014779:Virus Replication
keywords: biotechnology; geminivirus; gene editing; genome editing; genome engineering; replicon; vector