Because of the capacity of geminiviruses to evolve rapidly
by mutation, recombination and pseudo-recombination,
the development of plants with durable virus resistance
continues to be a major challenge. One strategy involves
genetic crossing of resistant and susceptible Jatropha
germplasms. This strategy has the advantage that segregation
patterns can be clearly observed between resistant
and susceptible lines [9]. However, germplasm-mediated
resistance via crossbreeding is time-consuming and requires
a large number of progeny plants (large-scale field
tests) to ascertain segregation patterns in future generations
[9]. Therefore, transgenic technology has been considered
as the method of choice for improving the virus
resistance of J. curcus. Recently, we and other groups have
established transformation platforms which facilitate the
transfer of foreign genes into the J. curcus genome [10-13],
and we have used this method to produce virus-resistant
transgenic J. curcus.