The discovery of a highly conserved cellular machinery that can regulate gene expression in response to double-stranded RNA may revolutionize mammalian virology. This revolution promises not only a deeper understanding of host-pathogen interactions and a novel set of experimental tools to explore the mechanism of viral replication but may also yield new therapeutic approaches. Even though the field of RNA silencing (or RNA interference [RNAi]) as applied to mammalian viruses is barely a year old, there is already enough material to appreciate its importance and to discuss its implications. Since an impressive number of excellent reviews on RNAi have been published recently (25, 27, 62), here we emphasize mammalian RNA silencing as it concerns one of its (presumably) natural targets, viruses.
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Gitlin et al. (2003) studied this question.
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