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Review
. 2019 Feb 28;11(3):203.
doi: 10.3390/v11030203.

The Tug-of-War between Plants and Viruses: Great Progress and Many Remaining Questions

Xiaoyun Wu  1 , Adrian Valli  2 , Juan Antonio García  3 , Xueping Zhou  4   5 , Xiaofei Cheng  6
Affiliations
Review

The Tug-of-War between Plants and Viruses: Great Progress and Many Remaining Questions

Xiaoyun Wu et al. Viruses. .

Abstract

Plants are persistently challenged by various phytopathogens. To protect themselves, plants have evolved multilayered surveillance against all pathogens. For intracellular parasitic viruses, plants have developed innate immunity, RNA silencing, translation repression, ubiquitination-mediated and autophagy-mediated protein degradation, and other dominant resistance gene-mediated defenses. Plant viruses have also acquired diverse strategies to suppress and even exploit host defense machinery to ensure their survival. A better understanding of the defense and counter-defense between plants and viruses will obviously benefit from the development of efficient and broad-spectrum virus resistance for sustainable agriculture. In this review, we summarize the cutting edge of knowledge concerning the defense and counter-defense between plants and viruses, and highlight the unexploited areas that are especially worth investigating in the near future.

Keywords: RNA silencing; autophagy; dominant resistance; innate immunity; translation repression.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Schematic overview of plant antiviral pathways and viral counter-defenses. Pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMP)-triggered immunity (PTI), effector-triggered immunity (ETI), RNA silencing, ATYPICAL DOMINANT VIRAL RESISTANCE PROTEINs (ADVR), translation repression, and ubiquitination-mediated and autophagy-mediated protein degradation are indicated by light blue, dark blue, purple, red, pink and green arrows, or lines with bars, respectively. Virus infection circles are indicated by yellow arrows, and viral counter-defenses are indicated by blue lines with bars. Red circles with “P” and “U” letter indicate phosphorylation and ubiquitination, respectively. Unknown or putative paradigms are indicated as“?”.
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