The efficacy of RNAi in the study of the plant cytoskeleton

Recent studies on a variety of organisms point to the ubiquity of RNA interference (RNAi) as a means to induce a gene-specific block to translation. RNAi has gained popularity in the last few years in the study of a number of problems in development. In this review, we highlight recent findings with RNAi using several different kinds of animals and fungi, and we show how these responses parallel cosuppression effects described in plants nearly a decade earlier. We then point to the efficacy of RNAi in studying minor and regulatory components of the plant cytoskeleton, and we highlight some recent studies using this approach with the water fern, Marsilea vestita.