It never fails—you want your best scissors, your roll of duct tape, and your finest pen, but they’re all in different rooms. The best tools do you no good at all if they’re not together, whether it’s in your house or in a plant cell. Recent work has generatedmany novel tools for genome engineering (reviewed in Belhaj et al., 2013). For example, engineered nucleases can generate site-specific do...

The replication-associated protein (Rep) of geminiviruses, single-stranded DNA viruses of higher plants, is essential for virus replication. Since these viruses do not encode their own polymerases, Rep induces differentiated plant cells to reenter the cell cycle by interacting with the plant homologues of retinoblastoma proteins in order to activate the host DNA synthesis machinery. We have use...

The genome of the geminivirus tomato golden mosaic virus (TGMV) consists of two single-stranded circular DNAs, A and B, that replicate through a rolling-circle mechanism in nuclei of infected plant cells. The TGMV origin of replication is located in a conserved 5' intergenic region and includes at least two functional elements: the origin recognition site of the essential viral replication prot...