title: Agrobacterium-mediated inoculation of plants with tomato golden mosaic virus DNAs.
abstract: We have adapted the "agroinfection" procedure of Grimsley and co-workers [4,5] to develop a simple, efficient, reproducible infectivity assay for the insect-transmitted, split-genome geminivirus, tomato golden mosaic virus (TGMV). Agrobacterium T-DNA vectors provide efficient delivery of both components of TGMV when used in mixed inoculation of wild-type host plants. A greater increase in infection efficiency can be obtained by Agrobacterium delivery of the TGMV A component to "permissive" transgenic plants. These "permissive" plants contain multiple tandem copies of the B component integrated into the host genome. An inoculum containing as few as 2000 Agrobacterium cells can produce 100% infection under these conditions. Further, our results show that there is a marked effect of the configuration of the TGMV A components within the T-DNA vector on time of symptom development. We have also found that transgenic plants carrying tandem copies of the A component do not complement the B component. Possible mechanisms to explain these results and the potential use of this system to further study the functions of the geminivirus components in infection are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Plant Molecular Biology, Biological Sciences, Monsanto Company, 700 Chesterfield Village Pkwy, 63198, St. Louis, MO, USA.
authors.forename: J S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Elmer
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Sunter
authors.forename: W E
authors.initials: WE
authors.lastname: Gardiner
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Brand
authors.forename: C K
authors.initials: CK
authors.lastname: Browning
authors.forename: D M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Bisaro
authors.forename: S G
authors.initials: SG
authors.lastname: Rogers