Plant eIF4E isoforms as factors of susceptibility and resistance to potyviruses

Abstract

Potyviruses are the largest group of plant-infecting RNA viruses that affect a wide range of crop plants. Plant resistance genes against potyviruses are often recessive and encode translation initiation factors eIF4E. The inability of potyviruses to use plant eIF4E factors leads to the development of resistance through a loss-of-susceptibility mechanism. Plants have a small family of eIF4E genes that encode several isoforms with distinct but overlapping functions in cell metabolism. Potyviruses use distinct eIF4E isoforms as susceptibility factors in different plants. The role of different members of the plant eIF4E family in the interaction with a given potyvirus could differ drastically. An interplay exists between different members of the eIF4E family in the context of plant–potyvirus interactions, allowing different eIF4E isoforms to modulate each other’s availability as susceptibility factors for the virus. In this review, possible molecular mechanisms underlying this interaction are discussed, and approaches to identify the eIF4E isoform that plays a major role in the plant–potyvirus interaction are suggested. The final section of the review discusses how knowledge about the interaction between different eIF4E isoforms can be used to develop plants with durable resistance to potyviruses.

A natural substitution of a conserved amino acid in eIF4E confers resistance against multiple potyviruses

“…Mutations in susceptibility genes usually confer resistance against potyviruses (Zlobin & Taranov, 2023 ). Recently, variants of some other non‐eIF4E susceptibility factors have also been reported to confer resistance to potyviruses.…”

“…These data indicated that the amino acid substitution D71G in eIF4E may result in broad‐range resistance to potyviruses. Besides eIF4E, eIF(iso)4E also plays important roles in the infection of many potyviruses (Zlobin & Taranov, 2023 ). We found the amino acid residue D 71 also present in eIF(iso)4E.…”

Study on Italian Onion Cultivars/Ecotypes towards Onion Yellow Dwarf Virus (OYDV) Infection

“…Since viruses do not possess their own translation factors, they employ different strategies to synthetize proteins, such as recruiting host EIF genes, through the modulation of EIF4e and EIF4g activity in favour of viral, rather than plant, protein synthesis [14]. In other potyvirus-plant pathosystems, it had been shown that EIF4e or EIF4g mutations can confer resistance to plant viruses [16][17][18], but little information is available in the frame of OYDV-onion interaction, despite the EIF gene modulation that could compromise the growth and development of OYDV-infected onion plants [14,19], causing alterations in the onion bulbs physiology, such as changes in water balance and accumulation in leaves and bulbs [20].…”

A vicinal oxygen chelate protein facilitates viral infection by triggering the unfolded protein response in Nicotiana benthamiana

“…Plant viruses propagate efficiently in plants by hijacking many host cell factors encoded by recessive viral resistance genes (Hashimoto et al, 2016). The eukaryotic translation initiation factor genes eIF4E and eIF4G are the most extensively studied recessive resistance genes to date; their knockout led to plant resistance against many potyviruses (Zlobin and Taranov, 2023). Host plants have evolved sophisticated regulatory strategies to counter stress conditions and viral infection, such as phytohormonal crosstalk (Huot et al, 2014).…”