Viruses are the most abundant biological entities on Earth and the major carriers of disease and mortality as well as the drivers of global processes.How plant viruses potentially influence global processes is an emergent issue,particularly for their putative im-plications in applications.Upon infection and spread,plant vi-ruses are capable of reprogramming host gene expression via RNA silencing by releasing viral suppressors of RNA silencing,viral small interfering RNAs (vsiRNAs),and by inducing the pro-duction of viral-associated small interfering RNAs (va-siRNAs).Recently,studies on various crop-virus pathosystems suggest that RNA silencing suppressors (RSSs),vsiRNAs,and va-siRNAs activate molecular processes that could confer broad-spectrum resistance to plants.In Figure 1,emblematic cases are highlighted:in tomato,pathogen-derived RSSs relieved the microRNA miR482-mediated suppression of resis-tance genes in infected plants and enhanced basal immunity against bacteria (Shivaprasad et al.,2012;Canto-Pastor et al.,2019) (Figure 1A);in rice,upon Rice stripe virus infection,miR528 was preferentially associated with the cleavage-defective,RNA-induced silencing complex leading to elevated L-ascorbate oxidase activity and higher basal reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation (Wu et al.,2017) (Figure 1B);and in Brassicaceae,va-siRNAs accumulated during infection by Cauliflower mosaic virus,a member of the Caulimoviridae family,and drove the widespread silencing of host gene expression and downregulation of Catalase 3 (CAT3) mRNA,one of the major H2O2 scavengers that contribute to ROS homeostasis (Leonetti et al.,2021) (Figure 1C).