Although the duality of symptommodulating effects caused by satellite
RNAs of CMV has been known since its
discovery (11), with the accelerated quest
for practical applications more attention
has been focused on the ameliorative effects of viral satellite RNAs and on the
development of technologies to transfer
such benefits to crop plants via preinoculation or directly into the plant genome
using Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated plant transformation (12). The relative
benefits and drawbacks of these two technologies have been recently reviewed (22).