A Begomovirus Nuclear Shuttle Protein-Interacting Immune Hub: Hijacking Host Transport Activities and Suppressing Incompatible Functions.

Begomoviruses ( family) represent a severe constraint to agriculture worldwide. As ssDNA viruses that replicate in the nuclei of infected cells, the nascent viral DNA has to move to the cytoplasm and then to the adjacent cell to cause disease. The begomovirus nuclear shuttle protein (NSP) assists the intracellular transport of viral DNA from the nucleus to the cytoplasm and cooperates with the movement protein (MP) for the cell-to-cell translocation of viral DNA to uninfected cells.

Engineering resistance against geminiviruses: A review of suppressed natural defenses and the use of RNAi and the CRISPR/Cas system.

The Geminiviridae family is one of the most successful and largest families of plant viruses that infect a large variety of important dicotyledonous and monocotyledonous crops and cause significant yield losses worldwide. This broad spectrum of host range is only possible because geminiviruses have evolved sophisticated strategies to overcome the arsenal of antiviral defenses in such diverse plant species. In addition, geminiviruses evolve rapidly through recombination and pseudo-recombination to naturally create a great diversity of virus species with divergent genome sequences giving the virus an advantage over the host recognition system.

Virus perception at the cell surface: revisiting the roles of receptor-like kinases as viral pattern recognition receptors.

Activation of antiviral innate immune responses depends on the recognition of viral components or viral effectors by host receptors. This virus recognition system can activate two layers of host defence, pathogen-associated molecular pattern (PAMP)-triggered immunity (PTI) and effector-triggered immunity (ETI). While ETI has long been recognized as an efficient plant defence against viruses, the concept of antiviral PTI has only recently been integrated into virus-host interaction models, such as the RNA silencing-based defences that are triggered by viral dsRNA PAMPs produced during infection.

NIK1-mediated translation suppression functions as a plant antiviral immunity mechanism.

Plants and plant pathogens are subject to continuous co-evolutionary pressure for dominance, and the outcomes of these interactions can substantially impact agriculture and food security. In virus-plant interactions, one of the major mechanisms for plant antiviral immunity relies on RNA silencing, which is often suppressed by co-evolving virus suppressors, thus enhancing viral pathogenicity in susceptible hosts. In addition, plants use the nucleotide-binding and leucine-rich repeat (NB-LRR) domain-containing resistance proteins, which recognize viral effectors to activate effector-triggered immunity in a defence mechanism similar to that employed in non-viral infections.

Sustained NIK-mediated antiviral signalling confers broad-spectrum tolerance to begomoviruses in cultivated plants.

Begomovirus-associated epidemics currently threaten tomato production worldwide due to the emergence of highly pathogenic virus species and the proliferation of a whitefly B biotype vector that is adapted to tomato. To generate an efficient defence against begomovirus, we modulated the activity of the immune defence receptor nuclear shuttle protein (NSP)-interacting kinase (NIK) in tomato plants; NIK is a virulence target of the begomovirus NSP during infection. Mutation of T474 within the kinase activation loop promoted the constitutive activation of NIK-mediated defences, resulting in the down-regulation of translation-related genes and the suppression of global translation.