Abstract: Ethylene, a simple organic molecule with complex biological function, has profound and versatile effects on the growth and development of higher plants as a plant hormone. These effects include promoting fruit ripening, flowering and leaf senescence, petal and leaf abscission, inhibiting seedling elongation, stimulating root initiation, relating to the sexual differentiation of flower in cucumber, promoting initiation of the flowering of pineapples, and increasing latex flow in rubber trees and so on. It is recently reported that ethylene has outstanding effect in disease resistance of plant, however, the metabolism of ethylene in disease resistance of plant is not clear. As the antisense gene technique has been applied to higher plants, the more and more antisense transgenic plants containing antisense ethylene forming genes have been obtained. Therefore it is a successful way to control effect of ethylene on the growth and development of higher plants by controlling its biosynthesis by antisense RNA, and also a successful breeding way to obtain expected transgenic plants. This paper summarizes the effect of ethylene on the growth and development of higher plants, especially on disease resistance of plants.The antisense-gene technique and the current work on the studies of transgenic plants containing antisense ethylene forming genes are also introduced.

Key words: Ethylene, Growth and development of plant, Disease resistance, Antisense-gene technique