title: Peptide-mediated broad-spectrum plant resistance to tospoviruses.
abstract: Plant viruses have a significant impact on agronomic losses worldwide. A new strategy for engineering virus-resistant plants by transgenic expression of a dominant interfering peptide is presented here. This peptide of 29 aa strongly interacts with the nucleocapsid proteins (N) of different tospoviruses. Transgenic Nicotiana benthamiana lines expressing the peptide fused to a carrier protein were challenged with five different tospoviruses that have a nucleocapsid protein interacting with the peptide. In the transgenic plants, strong resistance to tomato spotted wilt virus, tomato chlorotic spot virus, groundnut ring spot virus, and chrysanthemum stem necrosis virus was observed. This therefore demonstrates the feasibility of using peptide "aptamers" as an in vivo tool to control viral infection in higher plants.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Carl-von-Linné Weg 10, 50829 Cologne, Germany.
authors.forename: Christoph
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Rudolph
authors.forename: Peter H
authors.initials: PH
authors.lastname: Schreier
authors.forename: Joachim F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Uhrig
mesh_terms: D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D005818:Genetic Engineering; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D019590:Nucleocapsid Proteins / Q000235:genetics; D010455:Peptides / Q000235:genetics / Q000494:pharmacology*; D010935:Plant Diseases / Q000821:virology*; D030821:Plants, Genetically Modified; D014026:Nicotiana / Q000235:genetics / Q000821:virology*; D017865:Tospovirus / Q000187:drug effects* / Q000235:genetics / Q000472:pathogenicity*
chemical_list: D019590:Nucleocapsid Proteins; D010455:Peptides