Rice Stripe Virus Coat Protein-Mediated Virus Resistance Is Associated With RNA Silencing in Arabidopsis

Feng Sun; Peng Hu; Wei Wang; Ying Lan; Linlin Du; Yijun Zhou; Tong Zhou

doi:10.3389/fmicb.2020.591619

Rice Stripe Virus Coat Protein-Mediated Virus Resistance Is Associated With RNA Silencing in Arabidopsis

Front Microbiol. 2020 Nov 13:11:591619. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2020.591619. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Feng Sun¹, Peng Hu^{1

2}, Wei Wang^{1

3}, Ying Lan¹, Linlin Du¹, Yijun Zhou¹, Tong Zhou^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Food Quality and Safety-State Key Laboratory Cultivation Base of Ministry of Science and Technology, Institute of Plant Protection, Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanjing, China.
² The State Key Laboratory of Crop Genetics and Germplasm Enhancement, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, China.
³ College of Plant Protection, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, China.

Abstract

Rice stripe virus (RSV) causes rice stripe disease, which is one of the most serious rice diseases in eastern Asian countries. It has been shown that overexpression of RSV coat protein (CP) in rice plants enhances resistance against virus infection. However, the detailed mechanism underlying RSV CP-mediated virus resistance remains to be determined. In this study, we show that both translatable and non-translatable RSV CP transgenic Arabidopsis plants exhibited immunity to virus infection. By using deep sequencing analysis, transgene-derived small interfering RNAs (t-siRNAs) from non-translatable CP transgenic plants and virus-derived small interfering RNAs (vsiRNAs) mapping in the CP region from RSV-infected wild-type plants showed similar sequence distribution patterns, except for a significant increase in the abundance of t-siRNA reads compared with that of CP-derived vsiRNAs. To further test the correlation of t-siRNAs with RSV immunity, we developed RSV CP transgenic Arabidopsis plants in an siRNA-deficient dcl2/3/4 mutant background, and these CP transgenic plants showed the same sensitivity to RSV infection as non-transgenic plants. Together, our data indicate that the expression of RSV CP protein from a transgene is not a prerequisite for virus resistance and RSV CP-mediated resistance is mostly associated with the RNA silencing mechanism in Arabidopsis plants.

Keywords: CP-mediated resistance; RNA silencing; Rice stripe virus; dcl2/3/4; deep sequence.