a method for producing genetically transgenic plants exhibiting resistance to a geminivirus such as tomato yellow leaf curl virus . in another aspect , the invention embraces chimeric plant genes , cassettes containing the chimeric plant genes , heterologous dna segments containing the cassettes , and genetically transgenic cells and differentiated plants which exhibit resistance to geminiviruses . in yet another aspect , the invention embraces bacterial cells and plant transformation vectors comprising a heterologous dna segment encoding for resistance to geminiviruses .