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Genetic Engineering with Plant Viruses, and Their Potential as Vectors

1983; Elsevier BV; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s0065-3527(08)60720-4

1557-8399

Roger Hull, Jeffrey W. Davies,

Plant tissue culture and regeneration

The chapter discusses the potential of plant viruses as vectors for introducing foreign genes into plants. Understanding how viruses function and interact with their hosts may lead to means of controlling some economically important plant diseases; inserting foreign genes may enable a means of improving economically important crops. This chapter examines how molecular biological techniques, especially molecular cloning and in vitro mutation, are being applied to the study of plant viruses, what progress has been made so far, and how gene vectors might be derived from plant viruses. There are two main uses of genetic engineering with regard to plant viruses: cloning of viral sequences in prokaryotic systems and the development of vector systems for eukaryotes. Gaining expression of a foreign gene in a vector derived from a plant virus is still an unattained goal, but considerable progress is made in an area prerequisite to this—namely, understanding the mechanisms of replication, transcription, and translation of virus genes. The vector requires the necessary sequences for replication, transcription (promoters), and other regulatory signals. The successful vector may be a second-generation vector constructed of these basic requirements from different origins. It might comprise a replication signal from one plant virus, promoters from another (even animal) virus, parts of plant genes, and part of a bacterial plasmid to allow amplification and selection in bacteria.