Plant viruses have a significant impact on agronomic losses worldwide. A new strategy for engineering virus-resistant plants by transgenic expression of a dominant interfering peptide is presented here. This peptide of 29 aa strongly interacts with the nucleocapsid proteins (N) of different tospoviruses. Transgenic Nicotiana benthamiana lines expressing the peptide fused to a carrier protein were challenged with five different tospoviruses that have a nucleocapsid protein interacting with the peptide. In the transgenic plants, strong resistance to tomato spotted wilt virus, tomato chlorotic spot virus, groundnut ring spot virus, and chrysanthemum stem necrosis virus was observed. This therefore demonstrates the feasibility of using peptide ''aptamers'' as an in vivo tool to control viral infection in higher plants.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.