Beyond chemicals: RNAi-based solutions for plant science - Advances, challenges, and future perspectives

The sustainable production of industrial crops faces escalating threats from plant pests, diseases, climate change, and environmental degradation. While agrochemicals remain foundational for crop protection, their indiscriminate use generates hazardous residues, ecological damage, and pesticide resistance. Concurrently, advanced breeding technologies encounter limitations in efficiency, cost, and ethical scrutiny. RNA interference (RNAi) has emerged as a transformative, sustainable solution, offering high target specificity, minimal environmental impact, and flexibility in application. This review provides a critical, comparative synthesis of RNAi technology, evaluating its trajectory from proof-of-concept to a sustainable platform for crop protection and improvement. We elucidate the conserved molecular mechanisms of RNAi, detail innovations in dsRNA design and synthesis, and analyze strategic application avenues. Key implementation directions include gene function validation, crop improvement in industrial species, and RNA pesticide development. Landmark achievements underscore practical viability, RNAi reduces residues and resistance evolution compared to agrochemicals, while enabling tunable gene knockdown and leveraging systemic siRNA mobility relative to genome editing. However, several obstacles remain to be overcome for practical application, including delivery limitations, dsRNA instability, off‑target effects, regulatory barriers, and high production costs. We conclude by outlining forward-looking strategies to advance RNAi as a scalable, environmentally sustainable platform for the protection and enhancement of industrial crop systems.