The existence of RNA-dependent RNA polymerases (EC 2.7.7.48) in plants has been definitely proven by their isolation in pure form from cucumber and tobacco in our laboratory and from cowpea at Wageningen. These enzymes are single-chain proteins of 100-130 kilodaltons. They show clear physical and biochemical differences characteristic for a given plant species, even when their amounts in the plants were greatly increased prior to isolation by infection with the same virus. The role of these enzymes in plant physiology remains unknown. A few years later several laboratories took up the study ofthe RNA-dependent RNA polymerase in tobacco, and they showed that the properties ofstill very crude enzyme preparations were indistinguishable from those of the enzyme present in greater amounts in plants infected with tobacco necrosis virus or alfalfa mosaic virus (3-6). Biochemists and molecular biologists, however, have shown scant interest in the existence of this class of enzymes of eukaryotic cells. Thus we continue to see books, chapters, and papers entitled "RNA polymerases" with the tacit assumption that these are all DNA transcriptases.Because the amounts of these enzymes in plants are usually low, but increased by RNA virus infection, interest in them has remained mostly restricted to plant virologists. Among these there were several camps holding at different times different opinions. One small group for a while retained doubts that such enzymes really existed in their uninfected control plants. Ac-tually in one plant, cucumber, no definite evidence for this enzyme has been reported. Another group claimed that the virusspecific enzymes (the viral RNA replicases) differed from the plant RNA-dependent RNA polymerases. As stated, virus infection is often used to increase the amounts and thus facilitate the purification and biochemical study of these enzymes. The fact that in association with viral RNA they are largely membrane bound, whereas in healthy plants they are mostly soluble or cytoplasmic, has represented an obstacle in the realization that these were nevertheless the same enzymes. Our conviction (3, 5) that they differed only in amount and localization has, however, gained ground in recent years. Data published since 1978, as well as data presented at recent international congresses, have illustrated this evolution of increased harmony (7-12,*).The progress in this research and the consensus arrived at in the past few years will now be briefly reviewed, followed by a consideration of the important questions: how do viruses increase the amounts of these enzymes, and what is their physiological role in the plants?The successful isolation ofa pure plant RNA-dependent RNA polymerase from healthy cauliflower was reported in the second and very brief paper by (15)(16)(17)(18), showed that various properties of the enzyme from tobacco and cowpea differed, even when the plants were infected by the same virus. This proved that the enzyme upon virus infection was still completely host-specific, thus not ...