Summary Virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) is an extremely powerful tool for plant functional genomics. We used Tobacco rattle virus (TRV)-derived VIGS vectors expressed from binary vectors within Agrobacterium to induce RNA silencing in plants. Leaf infiltration is the most common method of agroinoculation used for VIGS but this method has limitations as it is laborious for large-scale screen...

Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) and related Ipomoea species are frequently infected by monopartite begomoviruses (genus Begomovirus, family Geminiviridae), known as sweepoviruses. Unlike other geminiviruses, the genomes of sweepoviruses have been recalcitrant to rendering infectious clones to date. Thus, Koch's postulates have not been fullfilled for any of the viruses in this group. Three novel...

BACKGROUND Plant viral vectors offer high-yield expression of pharmaceutical and commercially important proteins with a minimum of cost and preparation time. The use of Agrobacterium tumefaciens has been introduced to deliver the viral vector as a transgene to each plant cell via a simple, nonsterile infiltration technique called "agroinoculation". With agroinoculation, a full length, systemica...

A fluorescent viral clone of the polerovirus Turnip yellows virus (TuYV) was engineered by introducing the Enhanced Green Fluorescent Protein (EGFP) sequence into the non-structural domain sequence of the readthrough protein, a minor capsid protein. The resulting recombinant virus, referred to as TuYV-RTGFP, was infectious in several plant species when delivered by agroinoculation and invaded e...

The genome of the geminivirus tomato golden mosaic virus (TGMV) consists of two circular DNA molecules designated as components A and B. The A component contains the only virally-encoded function required for autonomous replication in infected plant cells. We used agroinoculation of petunia leaf discs with the A component to develop a transient expression system which permits direct examination...

Transgenic expression of proteins in plants is central to research and biotechnology, and, often, it desirable obtain this without altering the nuclear or plastid genomes. Thus, vectors based on plant viruses that infect multiple cells are useful; furthermore, they also advantageous for studies life cycle virus itself. Here, we report development an vector a Turnip vein-clearing (TVCV), tobamov...