African cassava mosaic virus (ACMV) in the geminivirus family has being affected 500 million people worldwide by devastating cassava crops during the past decades. It has caused severe symptoms and reduced yield up to the complete loss of roots, the main starchy food source especially for subsistence farmers in Africa. How can a tiny virus with a small genome evoke such dramatic effects? The viral key component, the replication-initiator protein (Rep), forces differentiated plant cells in the phloem to reactivate DNA synthesis. Even more, it does the same in model cells of fission yeast. We have identified, now, a potential cyclin interaction motif, RXL, in the sequence of ACMV Rep, which may be important for cell cycle control. This motif is essential to induce rereplication in yeast and necessary for viral infection of plants.
Source: www.virologyhighlights.com
I am a sucker for geminiviruses and their replication – as can be seen in the pages published here and elsewhere over the years. It is fascinating to me that a small protein like Rep – only ~30 kDa – can do so many things, and especially interfere in such a fundamental way with organised, differentiated cells.
What is even more interesting is that it can do it in such a wide variety of systems: it’s been shown that ACMV can replicate in maize protoplasts as well as in the dicotyledonous cassava; it can evidently function well in yeast as well – and via a pathway that no-one suspected before now.
Truly, a protein of many parts! Congratulations to Katharina Hipp and to my old friends Bruno and Holger.
See on Scoop.it – Virology News
ViroBlogy 
9 February, 2015 at 00:09 |
[…] “We wanted to know how many mechanisms bacteria possess to localize subcellular components, and to answer this question, we set out to image the localization pattern of nearly every protein in a bacterial cell for the entire cell cycle.” […]