highly significantp < 0.01
Differences were considered statistically significant at p < 0.05 (*), highly significant at p < 0.01 (**), and extremely significant at p < 0.001 (***). 3 Results and discussion 3.1 The design of RNAi vector for UGPase knockdown and mutant generation RNA interference (RNAi) is a gene silencing mechanism that operates at both post-transcriptional (PTGS) and transcriptional (TGS) levels.