RESEARCH ARTICLE


Silencing of ORFs C2 and C4 of Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl Virus Engenders Resistant or Tolerant Plants



Yuval Peretz, Assaf Eybishtz , Ilan Sela*
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Institute for Plant Sciences and Genetics, Rehovot 76100, Israel

Article Information


Identifiers and Pagination:

Year: 2011
Volume: 5
First Page: 141
Last Page: 147
Publisher Id: TOVJ-5-141
DOI: 10.2174/1874357901105010141

Article History:

Received Date: 5/7/2011
Revision Received Date: 5/9/2011
Acceptance Date: 21/9/2011
Electronic publication date: 13/12/2011
Collection year: 2011

© Peretz et al.; Licensee Bentham Open.

open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Institute for Plant Sciences and Genetics, Rehovot 76100, Israel; Tel: +972-8-9489377; Fax: +972-8-9473402; E-mail: sela@agri.huji.ac.il


Abstract

The IL-60 system is a transient universal vector system for expression and silencing in plants [1]. This vector has been derived from Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV). The viral intergenic region (IR) is a non-coding short (314 b) sequence separating the viral sense-oriented genes from the complementary-oriented genes. IR carries the viral origin of replication as well as a promoter at each end. Placing a gene segment between two IRs at opposite orientations followed by trans-activation of the construct by the plasmid IL-60-BS, caused silencing of the pertinent gene as indicated by the silencing of the endogenous gene PDS.. The viral genes C2 and C4 are implicated as having a role in viral-directed silencing suppression. The silencing of C2 and C4 intervened with the virus ability to counter-react to viral silencing by the host plant, thus engendering resistance or tolerance.

Keywords: TYLCV, silencing, silencing suppressors, resistance..